Over the past month I have been doing a lot of running and have made several new discoveries. Some of these discoveries have come from within and others (the more colorful ones) have appeared along my running routes. For example, while doing part of an eleven miler in Brooklyn Bridge Park, I passed a man sunbathing on the grass wearing nothing but a gold banana hammock. I did a double-take (not breaking stride however) to take a second look and then my brain kicked in and I looked away before my eyes caught fire.
As I was coming to the end of my run after a long day at work, I could see a bus of senior citizens stopped at the corner, as the doors opened I was screaming NOOOO in my head. As suspected, by the time I approached the corner a group of elderly ladies swarmed the area. To be nice I slowed down and walked around them before starting up again.
It reminded me of the time while on a run with Coach Brian we ran into a group of Chinese tourists in town for the Chinese New Year. Since they were taking up the entire sidewalk, we began to walk until we could get past them. Meanwhile, Brian who is Chinese and was behind me started singing "One of these things is not like the others..." I threatened to hurt him.
Recently, I have been working on two aspects of my running. The first is endurance and the second is pace. In every half marathon I have ever done I get to a point, usually around mile 12, where I feel that I cannot go on unless I stop walk and take a few deep breaths. Now there is no physical reason for this, it is all in my head. It is something that I need to push past and just keep going. If I need to slow my pace down fine, but otherwise I need to keep going.
As I have been thinking about why this happens I have come up with a theory. However, this theory may be coming out of my adorable rear end. So just go with me on this for a moment, before passing judgement. While training for the NYC Half Marathon I did group runs with the Alz. Team, but I also had to do two to three runs a week by myself. I usually ran at night after work and since I was on my own at night it limited the places I could run. Usually, I would run along Court Street in my Brooklyn hood, but that means my run is subject to the stop and go nature of the traffic. I began to think maybe I got to accustomed to the periodic pauses.
Now I don't allow myself to stop (unless it is an emergency--or I just need to munch a chew without choking on it). If I can't go straight because of traffic, I go to the right or the left, whichever way will keep me moving. I think it is helping to build endurance. At least my thighs are feeling something going on. While on a run this past weekend, I got to a point where I felt I needed to stop, but I knew it was all in my head. So even as I was picking out a spot to stop, I had a conversation with myself (not too crazy I hope) and made myself push through and continue on.
As far as my pacing goes I think I may be becoming too obsessed with that magic number. As I mentioned earlier, I have a new watch which keeps track of pace and distance. The watch also seems to be able to track me when I run the piers in Brooklyn Bridge Park. No more miracles for me. Damn! Whenever I complete a mile the watch vibrates and like Pavlov's dog I have to look. If I'm not happy with the time I keep pushing for a better one. The other day I was able to run a mile in nine minutes and five seconds--however I thought my heart was going to jump right out of my chest and I had to stop once (briefly) during the mile.
In order to break the cycle (or so I thought), I decided to go out for a nice comfortable three mile run and not pay attention to pace. However, when the watch vibrated I had to look at the readout--10:58. I was not happy with this time and a small part of me felt this time was wrong. Either way I decided I was going to push it a bit and see if I could get a better time. Mile two was done in 9:59. I had trimmed a minute off my time. Very cool.
I became torn on mile three, part of me wanted to see if I could keep the 9:59 pace up, but the other part wanted to do a cool down run. In the end I ran the last mile in 9:58. So much for not paying attention to pace. I guess the battle continues.
When I synced my watch with the app and computer I noticed that it broke down every facet of the run. For example the elevation--not sure what I will do with that fact, but it's nice to know. When I broke the recent workout into split times I discovered a category called Best Pace. To me this should be called "Ïn Your Dreams Pace". My 9:05 mile was recorded at a Best Pace of 7:37. Hummm....I would love to run a 7:37, however if I did I would really need someone to put my organs back after they had exploded out of my chest.
I am also including a few images of sights found on my most recent run. I hope to post a video of my strength training kettlebell workout within the next couple of days.
https://www.crowdrise.com/teamalz2015tcsnycmarathon1/fundraiser/marybrower
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