104 miles this month. Booyah!
Archive for May, 2007
Busy next few weeks
We’re back from MS, and none the worse for wear (except for a nasty case of poison ivy). Over the next few weeks, we are going to 2 weddings in NY, going to North Carolina for a week with Catherine’s family, and I’m going to a conference in San Diego. Plus we’re buying a condo. So much to do!
I’m hoping to maintain 25 miles per week of running during all this busy time. It was tough running in the heat in MS, but we were able to get some decent mileage in down there. I hope we can keep it up with all our traveling.
Poor Spenser was pitiful when we got home. He meowed for hours and wouldn’t be quiet unless we were petting him. He really missed us. I feel bad that we are leaving him again in a few days. 
Zoom Through the Zoo
Cath and I are visiting my parents in MS, and we ran the Zoom Through the Zoo 4-mile race in Memphis today. It was a pretty awesome race. The first two miles are actually in the zoo, with the other two in the park next to the zoo. It wasn’t too big either, maybe 400 people in the 4-miler. Afterwards, there was some very tasty BBQ which I greatly enjoyed.
My race didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I’ve been running quite a lot lately, up to 25 miles per week last week, so I felt like I was in pretty good shape for this race. My plan was to run even splits around 7:50-7:55 and finish under 31:30. It seemed a pretty reasonable goal.
I lined up near the front, since in my last race I lost over a minute in the crowd at the beginning. This turned out to be the right choice since I wasn’t held up at all by slower runners. But the problem with lining up that far forward was that I went out way too fast. My first mile was around 7:20, the second 7:53, third 8:38, and fourth 8:05. I was totally exhausted by the end of the second mile, with a nasty stitch in my side, and even considered walking, but instead I slowed it down a lot to save some energy for the fourth mile. I don’t even remember the fourth mile. All I could think about at that point was how much farther it was to the finish. My finish time was 31:55, and I finished 95th out of about 400 runners. I’m OK with that, since at least I ran under an 8-minute mile. But I still think with better pacing I could have done a 31:30.
I learned two things from this race:
- Positive splits are evil. My time was OK, but it’s a hellacious way to run a race. You feel like you are going to die, and you’ve still got half the race to go.
- The heat is killer. I’m not used to running in the heat (it hasn’t been over about 70 yet in Boston), and today’s race was at 85 degrees. I should have taken that more into account when setting my goals.
Cath, on the other hand, did great. She was shooting for 40:00 and finished in like 38:57. She did a great job and was really happy with her race. She started slow and finished fast, which is a much more comfortable way to run a race. I think with more even pacing, she could easily run a 38:00 or better at her current fitness level.
Dr. Catherine
Today was Cath’s graduation from med school. Will write more later, but yay for Cath!
Home alone
Catherine is done with medical school and has a month off before graduation. I’m busy with a paper deadline next week, so I’m not a lot of fun to hang out with when you have all day, every day free. Because of this, Catherine has gone to Cooperstown, NY, to visit her friends Kristin and Tom. I’m home alone for the next couple of days.
I tend to eat well when Catherine is gone. I cooked a buffalo chicken breast sandwich tonight. I marinated the chicken breast in buffalo wing sauce all day, then baked it in the oven for 40 minutes. I coated it with more buffalo sauce, then made a sandwich with blue cheese dressing, lettuce, and tomato. It was delicious and pretty good for me. I think this recipe will have to enter our standard rotation.
My running has been going pretty well. I took last week easy because my knee was bothering me, and I felt generally a little sore after several weeks in a row of high (for me) mileage. This week I’m switching over to running 5 days a week and shooting for a total of 20 miles. So far I like this new schedule. I’m only running 3-4 miles a day during the week, so I’m not as sore as when I was running the same mileage over 4 days. The weather is also perfect, which helps a lot.
I’m shooting for the ISMM deadline on May 14. At this point I’m still generating data and analyzing it, but I’ve seen some interesting stuff in our data and think we will have interesting results to publish. It’s coming down to the wire, and I hope we can get it done.
I’m now sitting on the couch, drinking a Victory Old Horizontal Barleywine and watching the San Antonio-Denver NBA playoff game. I feel like I should be doing work, but I may play a little Guitar Hero instead. 
