New shoes: check. Nice weather: sporadic
Posted by Gypsy on Feb 11, 2009
Living in Southern California, I expect every morning is going to be the perfect morning for a run. Unfortunately that is not always the case. Most of the time when I head out at 7 a.m. it’s still nice and cool and perfect for a 5-mile run. Then there are days like today, where I wake up and the rain is pouring down like a sheet. Luckily, I’ve already got an easy 15 miles in for the week, but with two days to go I need another 5 miles to hit my goal and yucky weather in the forecast.
On the plus side, I’m starting to see real improvement in my running. When I first started, it was taking me about an hour and six minutes to get through an easy 5-mile run. This week I was able to drop that to about an hour without any extra effort. This is a huge improvement. At this point, I’m hoping to get a couple more easy 20-mile weeks in before I bump that up and add in some speed training. I may do this earlier, though, if I find I’m recovering from my runs quicker.
Helping me out is the new shoes I bought last weekend. I got the Nike Zoom Elite+ 4, which is a performance stability shoe with tons of cushioning. At first they felt a little awkward, but that’s just because I’d been wearing my old shoes for about two years. So maybe just having some cushioning was a new sensation for me. Either way, I love them and definitely want another pair. I have them in blue, but am on the look out for them in purple as well so I don’t get the two pair confused. I’m an 8.5, so if you find them, let me know.
I’ve also registered for the America’s Finest City Half Marathon in August. Between now and then I’m hoping to do a few more races around San Diego to get prepared, mostly 5K and 10K distances. Still working on deciding which ones I want to do, though.
And now, here’s a pretty chart that shows what I’ve been up to running-wise:
Shoes/Trainers look good and the chart definately looks good; nice one on keeping it going - esp at 7am each morning :). Will we see more Pink bars in the chart throughout Feb and March?
Had a look for you and a lot of places seemed to be out of stock on the purple version, but did see this site (which is of course a UK based site)…http://www.prodirectrunning.com/prodinfo.asp?PID=RUN-402-009-042&DEPT=402&BRAND=009&SS=1&AFFID=78
Nice chart.!! Keep going on.. Those shoes are looking pretty fab.
A few more pink bars maybe, but ultimately it will continue to be mostly green for awhile. Tempo runs are great to do once a week, but no more than that. At this point in my training, its more important that I get more miles each week than gain speed. Once I’m up to 30 miles per week, then I will start looking at a definite speed day each week.
Though at this point, my easy runs are getting a lot faster, which means after this week I’ll start adding miles weekly. Weather permitting, of course.