#lowhr

[mrspietriestri]

I did basically a week of long walks to help the shin splints, which seems to have cured it. Sunday I talked the pool wife into going to run stairs with me at Lake Merritt. She was thinking I was talking about the 5-6 steps that occur around the lake, but I was talking about the Cleveland Cascade, which is where Cleveland Street gets too vertical and converts to a staircase that used to have a water feature on it.

(If you follow that link you can see the upper part of the stairs. We ran it 4 times. My fitbit said that was 36 flights of stairs.)

Then I took yesterday off because I had a morning site meeting with my contractor (we laid out the air conditioning system). So I really needed to get back to running today. To help with the shin splints I did a treadmill run, four miles low-HR. My thinking was to try to run a short run outside tomorrow, then another long treadmill run, alternating until I build up my legs for outside running. Just in time for it to turn cold and dark outside, of course.

Anyway, a pretty decent run. I ran at 4.5 mph which felt OK. I have not been being very good about low-HR running outside, so this was welcome. And my shins didn’t hurt at all.

Time: 1:02:48

Distance: 4.34 miles

Shoes: black altras (!!!)

Pain: right piriformis still crampy as heck

[mrspietriestri]

Five mile run today, and I did it outside. It was OK, I ran around the base a little and then around a development right outside the base, then back in for some more. I did Pokemon intervals which a friend told me about, where you run between pokestops or pokemon sightings, and that worked OK, but was a little hard to manage low-heartrate. I got a bunch of the usual pokemon but also a couple more interesting ones (a Ponyta and a Koffing), and I hatched two eggs. Not bad.

The pool-wife was out running at the same time on another part of the island and while we were running she was texting me asking pokemon questions which was hysterical. We’re going to go back to the mall tonight for more hunting because we are sad old ladies.

Time: 1:14:26

Distance: 5.40 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: right piriformis is super unhappy. I really need to do something about that.

[mrspietriestri]

I just never got around to logging my runs over the weekend. 

Friday I ended up doing a rest day because I could not fit a run in after work. That’s fine, I kind of needed it.

On Saturday I planned to run 11 miles but only ran 8 because I was meeting the pool-wife, who has been down (her sister is starting radiation for a brain tumour, and she just had a cancerous skin lesion removed herself, and some other things that seem just hard to bear), so we could go pokemon-hunting at the mall and a bit at the beach. Which we did, and we both had a great time and stayed out really late (AFTER ELEVEN) and got some fun/interesting pokemons (or whatever) plus like 1,000,000 Magnemites.

The 8 miles was easy and fine; I could have gone longer, but you make time for your friends because they are important.

Time: 2:00:00

Distance: 8.37 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: none

Sunday I spent the morning meeting with the MOST INDECISIVE CLIENTS EVER and we finally hashed out their second floor plan, and now I just need to wow them with the kitchen and home office design which they can dither about for another six months (I am not even kidding).

On my way home I saw that a few pokestops near the rental house had been lured, so I went there and caught some cool pokemons, which was fun. 

After that I went for a short easy run, about 4 miles (to round out my mileage for the month). That was kind of nice, I even pondered going a little longer but decided not to.

Then I took the young dog and she and I went for a short walk out to the shoreline because she needs to get more exercise and heeeeelllo pokemon hunting. She was super unhappy about being forced to walk and at one point just sat down and refused to move. It’s not like I can just carry her because she weighs 75 lbs and is kind of blobby. I finally cajoled her into moving and we managed to finish walking less than two miles in an hour.

It was a nice cooldown at least.

Time: 0:58:25 (I’m obviously only counting the actual run part)

Distance: 4.04 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: none

And then today I got up on time and decided I needed more sleep and went back to bed which was DELIGHTFUL.

[mrspietriestri]

I did not run yesterday. I had all-day training on the plumbing code updates (WOOT), then the pool-wife asked me to come over and help her clean her son’s room for another day (we started Thursday). Then we got right back to it today, so three days cleaning that den of filth. But now it is clean, I sorted out all his books and shelved them, we dusted and washed every surface, he has nine bags of stuff he has to either put away or give away in the next week, and there are three or four giant bags of trash to go out. Success. 

We also cleaned her entire dining room on Monday then I gave her our old dining room table on Wednesday, so that room is looking good. Next up: her kitchen. I can’t make my own house come together any faster so I’m taking it out on her.

Anyway, that meant I skipped my run Friday (I also stayed late at work doing a favour for another friend because I’m some kind of sucker), and my run today was a little shorter than I had planned: 5 miles instead of 8 miles. I’m going to make some of it up tomorrow but eh. The reality is that I don’t run fast enough to be able to do very high-mileage weeks, since I really do need some rest days in there.

So five miles, started at 4.3 mph then remembered I was going to pop up to 4.4 and did that. Not much of a difference, really. I watched Portlandia which is light and fluffy and only a little mean for me.

Oh, and best of the week this week was that we can now walk up into our new attic. It’s about five feet tall inside and is really a storage/mechanical space, but it was cool to go up there and look out over all the roofs of the neighborhood. The house renovation is really taking shape and it is very exciting.

Time: 1:17:46 

Distance: 5.34 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: none, but my ankles are really stiff now

[mrspietriestri]

emilydoesscience replied to your post:Five miles easy today. Monday’s easy run was super...

I like that idea of slowly cranking up the treadmill!

The idea is supposed to be to run at a set heart rate, and slowly increase the speed. It seems to come in fits and starts: I’ll run at the same speed for a month and then suddenly I can run a lot faster at the same heart rate, and I speed it up until I’m pushing the limits again and have to take walk breaks to stay below my target. I’m pretty happy with it as a base-building tool.

[mrspietriestri]

Five miles easy today. Monday’s easy run was super easy, so I turned the speed up from 4.2 to 4.3 today and it was still super easy (to be fair, that’s not that much of an increase). So Friday it’s going up to 4.4.

I watched Portlandia while I ran which was fine. I started watching it ages ago when it was still on the air but just didn’t stick with it, so there was nothing surprising there. I can’t watch anything that requires any kind of nuance or huge amounts of attention while running for somewhat obvious reasons, so it works.

I’m going to try to run every day for the rest of the month. August is going to be more of a refresh month for me with more rest days and hopefully more cross-training, so I want to go out with some decently high mileage for July. Also, the one thing that makes me a better runner is running more, so there you go.

Time: 1:16:42

Distance: 5.34 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: none, though my right piriformis is super sore and angry today (it was fine while I was running); I need to roll that out

[mrspietriestri]

Yesterday I ran 12 miles.

I haven’t been on here much since Friday afternoon because of the coup attempt in Turkey. I have a lot of family there, and the whole situation kind of ate my whole Friday afternoon and ate into my headspace. It had been our plan to move to Turkey in a couple of years for a year or two, to be closer to family for a while and get better at Turkish. Now that is up in the air, since the “democratically elected” president is an Islamist and I won’t live in an Islamic state. It remains to be seen what happens as a result of this weekend but things are very strange right now.

So yesterday I got up early and went for a 12 mile run. It was OK. I sweated a lot, and at the end I was having cold shakes because I chose not to eat anything even though I ran for three hours. That was foolish of me. I did stop in the middle and drink a couple of pints of water, which was great.

Then I immediately rushed off to spend time with my friend from out of town and the pool-wife, for different reasons. Out of town friend was very impressed with my run, which made me feel really good. She’s known me for 20+ years and she doesn’t make comments on bodies at all, but she said “keep it up” which is about as much as she would ever say about it, and it meant the world to me.

We did spend two hours at Michael’s, though, which I would have gladly skipped. She lives in Edinburgh and there is no comparable craft store, so she had a lot of shopping she wanted to do for cosplay. Also, her husband gets paid in US dollars so the currency fluctuations weren’t killing her. But we did have a great time and it was a delight to see her again.

Anyway, shorter run planned for later today when I stop being so damned tired. I think I am going to go take a nap now.

Time: 3:02:24

Distance: 12.30 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: a little left knee soreness, a little right knee soreness, it all worked out. 

[mrspietriestri]

Well, that week kind of sucked for running. 

It sucked in many, many other ways, as well. So I’m going to be OK with it. But my notes in my training diary for next week say: “just run, skip tumblr if needed” which is basically about focusing on the thing that matters most to me right now, which is running in my free time. (Not that I don’t love keeping up with people here, but priorities.) I’ve got a mileage goal for this month that I want to hit, and with this last week I need to focus to make it happen.

This weekend we spent most of our time helping our friend clean his garage, which we’ve been doing one weekend a month for a few months. We loaded my car up with art supplies from his late partner to donate, and everything looks so much cleaner and controlled, though we still have a long way to go. I also learned that while I do OK with being showered in rat poop, I really, really dislike having detergent spilled on me. The story there is that while cleaning out a rat nest (the reason why he needs help cleaning up) I found a bottle of detergent which turned out, when I picked it up, to have a hole in it, and I got detergent all over myself. It was SO GROSS. And I was SO CONFUSED because I have literally stuck my hand inside of farm animals without freaking out. Bonus was that when I was coated in detergent the rat poop stuck to me which was yucktown.

Anyway, no running yesterday because we worked all day, but today after we finished up for the weekend I squeezed in a 3-mile easy run (instead of the 5 miles on the schedule). I turned the speed up to 4.3 and that felt OK, though the exercise room was a little too hot. My knee is feeling better since I stopped squatting which is half yay and half boohoo.

Time: 0:50:17

Distance: 3.34 miles

Shoes: orange altras

Pain: none, though I could feel my left bunion the whole time