So this past weekend lived up to the mythos. In fact, the week leading up to it was something else as well. So my tale of last week is broken up into a few sections here, which I’ll go over one by one.

The Pee Pants

On Wednesday, during my tempo run, I noticed everyone I passed was giving me a funny look. An elderly couple looked at me as if they were confused. I jokingly thought to myself that they must not be used to seeing a lanky guy like myself expending so much energy to barely move. A mother and daughter walking their dog refused to respond when I greeted them. Then, one woman on a bike initially gave me a welcoming smile but then sort of glanced down and winced. It was then that I realized there was something wrong, so I checked to make sure my baggage was stowed (if you know what I mean) and everything was in order. Everything seemed fine except there was a sweat pattern developing around my crotch. I’m sure it looked like I peed my pants, but I didn’t and it could have looked far worse.

The Ulcer

Jay: I farted on Jason’s pillow, he farted on Jonah’s, thinking it was mine, and eventually pinkeye-d my pillow. I’m not proud of any of this.

Well, I didn’t develop pink-eye, but it sure felt like I did. Friday morning I stuggled to keep my eyes open and found it grew worse throughout the day, leading into light sensitivity and soreness. I assumed it was just something in my eye and a night’s sleep would clear it up. It actually became worse, so I went to the optometrist. Turns out I had developed an ulcer in my upper right eye and it had become emergent. I had to apply drops in my eye hourly and go back the next day to check to see if the prescription was effective. I took the opportunity to live like Batman the next day and avoided spending any time in the sun.

It cleared up by about 80% on Sunday and I was told I could scale back the prescription usage. I should be able to start wearing my contacts again by Friday.

The Stitch

As per our Sunday evening routine, I was finishing a few things on the grill (mushrooms and under-cooked pork) when yet another emergency occurred. Our cheap knives have this bad habit of not staying in the handle, which led to one of the steak-knives doing just that. From about 3 feet off the ground, it feel tip down into my foot. There wasn’t any pain, but gravity took over and blood starting spurting out. I yelled at Sunshine to try and get her to bring me a towel to stop the bleed. Her response: bring a towel and the Britta water pitcher, apply the later before the former. This just caused more blood to pour out, so I took the towel, wrapped the wound, and hurried into the bathroom tub.

I don’t claim to be even remotely medical, so I figured a hospital visit was in order. The hospital may be less than 5 miles away, but we had to wait 2 hours to see a doctor, bleeding wound and all. After a smart-assed male nurse came in to give me a tetanus shot, the PA decided I only needed 1 stitch, which was quickly administered.

She also recommended that I not run (the fact that I was a runner was only logical after she took my blood pressure and found it to be 104/55) until the stitch was removed next Wednesday. I said to hell with that and ran yesterday and today anyways, albeit slower than planned. I figured if there are people that can run without feet at all, then the least I could do was deal with a single stitch without whining.

So here are my pace charts for last week. I burned ~1500 calories and struggled with the heat all week. I took a few walk breaks due to the oppressive heat. Sunday was not a good run, as you can tell from all of the up and down motion in the chart. Hopefully this week will turn out better.

So last week didn’t produce anything eventful in the running area. I powered through the runs and found that I get better in second extended interval than the first. I struggled with intense 40 mph winds on Wednesday’s tempo run which sapped the energy from me and caused me to walk a few times. Uphill and into heavy winds like that is no way to start a 3 mile tough run. I also made the mistake of changing the route Wednesday due to the increased distance that I definately paid for thanks to the wind.

The only thing worth noting is I had an excellent run on Saturday. I did not fatigue until the halfway mark, which is about 2 miles further than it took last week.

I’m posting this late in the week because of the troubles I had with SportTracks again. This software is seriously pushing my patience. I accidentally hit the start button on my Garmin when I was changing on Saturday, so there was a few seconds of no movement until I realized I had done so. The trouble came with importing the data. SportTracks has this nagging bug where it does not successfully delete the last track, so my pace chart was horribly skewed because of that accidental split. I kept trying to remove it and did everything I could think of. The solution I stuck with was splitting the track at the time that I thought I finished, then removed the new activity.

These kinds of bugs are trivial to fix, but take an extrodinary amount of time to get resolved in a closed source environment. Every little nitnoid like this is driving me closer and closer to an open source solution, such as PyTrainer. In fact, I am tempted to get started helping with development.

Anyhoo, here’s the charts:

So there’s several things on today’s discussion agenda. Let’s get right down to business.

First up, I made a minor change to the site. I am now sifting the main content feed through FeedBurner. This means I will hopefully get a better idea who’s reading the blog. All I know right now is the tiny bit of information from the WordPress Stats plugin and that Google Reader thinks my blog is the most obscure thing I read. You may have also noticed that I updated the plugins and fixed the obsocialbookmarker plugin to provide links to some of the aggregators I’ve heard of. If I’m missing your favorite, do tell.

Also, I hit a milestone with my last post; it marked my 500th blog! That’s right, I’ve written way too many words that way too few people read. I’ve had some ups and downs, a few contintributors who have long stopped contributing, even watched as my wife set up her third Blogger account. Here’s to the next 500 posts!

The reason why I have not posted recently was more out of a superstition. Monday night was an incredibly intense game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Red Wings and the Penguins. It lasted for well over 100 minutes, into three overtime periods, and ended with a disappointing goal by the Penguins. Fear not, the Red Wings went back to Pittsburg to steal the cup from them on the Pens’ own ice. The celebration afterwards was riddled with boos and hisses, but it was still a sweet victory to see my boys bring The Cup home for the 4th time in 11 years.

Lastly, I never got to posting last week’s pace charts. Monday was tough because I stupidly decided to run in the afternoon and it easily broke the 90’s. The other runs were tough but managable. I’m still struggling with the long run. I felt better than last week, but only slightly. I think I am going to try and focus on maintaining a pace for a long time because I see to have trouble beyond 3 miles. Hopefully, this is just a decreased stamina due to the extended break and not loss of ability. I also need to see about excluding the walk breaks during the intervals as it greatly skews the graphs, so I decided to change to a non-continuous bar graph so it would display something useful.

I’m blathering, so here are the charts:

So this week, I ran a total of 6 times. That’s right, 6 consecutive days, I managed to lace up and run. In fact, I even created a schedule to follow which will allow me to rebuild my abilities and prepare for some races.

I decided to start by doing 2 extended interval runs a week before I go to the gym. What I’m referring to as an “extended interval run” is a run where I lump multiple intervals together and run them back-to-back without rest. Of course I can only run a few this way, but I will work my way up to running as far as my body will carry me. I ran 4 continuous quarter mile splits at 800 meter pace, which made for an 8:15 pace. I had struggled to do this last week, but succeeded both times this week.

I did manage to still get to the gym for a 30 minute workout twice. I spent 10 minutes on the stair machine, ten minutes on the rowing machine one day and bike the other, and still did a tough core workout. I have to admit, it was very gratifying to show up already sweaty, as if I am always busting my hump. It garnered interesting looks from the twenty-something girls at the checkin counter.

I also was able to hit my target pace during the intervals on Monday. Started out doing just the 4 800 meter intervals, which grew progressively slower. As you can tell from the pace chart, I walked the rest periods, which seems to greatly scew the chart. I’m not very happy with SportTracks and I’m growing increasingly frustrate with its complete lack of openness. I realize that these are the types of things that will never be fixed and asking for such changes usually results in the overly Windows forum community to write you off unless you’ve donated (read: bought the software). Downloadable shareware that’s closed source? Seriously? Hey Zone Five, 1994 called, they want their business model back.

Saturday was hell though. I made it though about 2 miles without any challenges, but started to find my heartrate had climbed up there and was not relenting. I was struggling to breath and my quads were starting to ache. It didn’t help to realize I had 4 miles left. I stopped about a half dozen times or more, as you can tell from the jumps in pace. However, there were about 3-4 times where I got lost because I decided to explore a neighborhood I had never been in. Getting lost can really take the wind out of my sails. I also made the mistake of thinking I wasn’t hungry when I left the house. I wasn’t, but quickly ran out of gas on the trail. After all of the hills, getting lost, draining my energy, and the complete frustration of not being able to keep pace, I ended the run early as to avoid continuing the horrible experience.

In the end, I think I may scale the Friday easy run back because I don’t think it helped any. It may in fact increase my risk for injury so I think I will scale back by a mile next week. Since I cut back a mile off the 6 miler yesterday, I’ll have to repeat this week next week to make sure I can continue the plan.

Here’s this week’s pace charts. I changed them to graph pace against distance since time doesn’t really help much.

Geez, that took forever to manually add each individual chart to a post like that.

So for the last few months, I have been really dodgy on my running. I haven’t kept any schedule that remotely resembles regularity. My running partner moved away to California for a new job and I’ve been struggling keeping myself motivated and accountable. I also have a terrible habit of pacing too fast, feeling like crap, then pausing the GPS unit while I catch my breath. I really want to break this habit.

Today is a new day. From here on out, I will start posting my pace charts. Since I am currently using Sport Tracks for my training log, I can generate the pace chart as a PNG directly. From there, I use F-Spot to tag the image and then upload it to my NextGen gallery. Every week, I will post the week’s worth of images and summarize how the training towards a sub-2 hour half-marathon.

I should note that I got this idea from Thomas Bubendorfer, who’s excellent blog I have become an avid reader. He also posts his heart-rate graphs, but I only have the Garmin 205, so no heart-rate.

So to kick things off, here is this week’s training. I had the Qualifier this week and I’m going to a funeral here in about an hour. So training early in the week didn’t happen, and I won’t be able to train again until I get back on Sunday evening (probably just go to the gym instead). I decided the quickest way to force my body and lungs to get accustomed to the pace I want to run is to just do it and progressively extend the distance. For the first week or 2 my intervals will be a single 1 mile sprint. I can’t do a long run this weekend, but I was start again at something less than 8 (probably 6 next week).

Without further ado, here is this week’s training:

I should also note that it does not appear that the NextGen gallery supports adding the detected tags to the official WordPress taxonomy. For the time being, the image tags will not appear in the tag cloud, so I won’t duplicate the tag by creating one now.

Also, you might notice a few significant drops in the paces. The bad habit I mentioned that I want to break. Basically, I stopped the watch to catch my breath, then started it back up. This habit can make a 30 minute run stretch on for upwards of an extra 15 minutes and it really bugs me that I do it. By posting these pace charts, I’m hoping to train harder and stop pausing the watch (unless I have to, i.e. for traffic or water).

I finally bought a new pair of running shoes last weekend. I have been using the Brooks Adrenaline GTS for a while; I’ve gone through 3 pairs now (on the 4th).

I went to my local Run On! and pestered the saleswomen to fit me for various shoes like I do every year. That is, once a year, I go to Run On! and try on a bunch of shoes to see if any of them suddenly fit and feel better than my last pair. Every time so far, I’ve kept with the Adrenaline because they fit like a glove and I have yet to experience any pain. Granted, I keep the milage at or under 30 a week right now and I stick with a reasonable pace, but I put them through the ringer. The last pair I just switched from had turned a dingy brown and have been worn through about 700 miles or so (had them since last August). Around January, I had to start using my expensive inserts to prevent injury. I always get lectured about how I should replace them every 400 miles, but like the dentist telling me to floss, I usually blow it off.

Well, I have a confession to make. Every time I buy a new pair of shoes, I spend a while sitting in front of the TV smelling them. The smell of new shoes is exhilarating, intoxicating even. I’m not sure what it is about the smell, but brand new shoes smell so good to me. Perhaps it’s my brain realizing the smell as a vision of all of the miles and meditation ahead of me. I feel like Cinderella would if she bought a pair of glass running shoes instead of slippers and found that the prince was a runner as well. I bet he couldn’t get 700 miles out of glass running shoes though.

The best part of new shoes: the joy of feeling like Superman again for a few weeks while they wear in.

A few months ago, the guy that I had been training with moved to California. It was difficult having not only a good friend move away, but also a great running partner. I struggled for the last few months to find the motivation to keep myself moving when exhaustion set it. I’ve heard that running is 90% mental and 10% genetic. I believe that entirely.

I missed the AT&T Half Marathon due to the registration closing before I could take the time to sign up. I was pretty upset about this and my running immediate took a turn for the worst. I started working overtime and school picked up quickly. I had a few bad weeks and it began to show on the weekend long runs. I finally gave in and posted on the local DRC website in hopes of finding a running partner.

Someone finally responded, and we met up last weekend. Of coarse that would be the worst long run I’ve had in months, but he was understanding. I am, as usual, not as good at running as this person, but his competitive nature will definitely push me harder than I’ve ever been pushed.

So it’s like my running has been rebooted. I like running alone, but there’s definately something to running with someone else. Maybe it’s the accountability or the inborn competitive dynamic of the group. Whatever the case, I’m really going to target that sub-2 hour half marathon like I hunger for it.

I intend on updating the running page, but I need to find some sort of race or event to have train towards. If anyone has any recommendations for events in the general Texas area (Dallas or Austin preferred), drop a comment because I would be willing to hear them out. I am going work on getting the photos page up and hopefully convince my wife to attend some of the longer events to get some quality photos.

See you on the road.