Wow how time flies when you are having fun… or is it when you are so busy life seems like a blur? Angie and I were commenting this morning while we were biking in the basement. “Can you believe it is already Thursday???? The days of the week just fly by.”
Unfortunately not all of the workouts do! No that is not really true, so far so good. Biking in the basement is getting a little old, but sadly is sooo convenient. It will be hard to work in the outside bike rides during the week. We typically bike 1.5 hours during the week and it is so much easier to get that done at 4:30am than to try and get outside at 5:30 or 6pm for that same amount of time. Plus April and May in Wisconsin have been a little more like March – cold and rainy. The basement is ALWAYS warm and dry!
I had a few confidence boosting runs in the last week. I have been doing most of my runs alone lately and they have been slow. I think I am going at a good clip and I look at my Garmin and I am doing about a 10 min/mile pace. When I run with the team, we are always around 9:30 or faster. So Sunday when I had to run 1.5 hours with Angie, I was pretty nervous about how bad this was going to hurt IF I could keep up! We took off about 6am in order to avoid interfering with the La Crosse Marathon and Half as we were using some of the same roads (La Crosse is a small town squished between bluffs and the Mississippi River). My strategy was to just relax and try to stay with Angie and NOT look at my Garmin. We were running along chatting and pretty soon Ang commented we were doing a pretty good pace. I thought to myself, “YEAH!! I feel okay!” We ended up back at my house with 10 miles in 1.5 hours! and best of all – I didn’t feel like I was going to die at any time. The last 10 minutes was tough but doable.
Tuesday, we had a 45 minute Z3, Z4 run (Z3 is 80% of max heart rate and Z4 is 90%) I typically do my weekday runs on one of two routes depending on the focus and distance needed. My “Ebner, Bump, UWL” route or my “Visiting Earl” route. My “Visiting Earl” route takes me to a park and then through the cemetery where my friend Earl is buried, I always stop and chat with Earl before heading back home. Since it was a Z3, Z4 run, I needed to do hills and no chatting with Earl (sorry Earl maybe next week!). I did my Ebner, Bump, UWL route and even after a 10:15+ pace up Ebner and the Bump, I still pulled out a 9:32 average pace for the 45 min run. That means I was sub 9 for about the last 15-20 minutes of no hills and it wasn’t a bad Z3! The hills were definitely Z4. Probably need to do more Ebner Bump runs to get that 10:15 pace faster!
Hoping for good weather this weekend so we can bike outside on Saturday as we have a 3.5 hr ride – not sure I can watch Man vs. Food for 3.5 hours and still be civil!