How This for a Hill!!

Here it is...one of the hill runs I implement every week. This one is fun for half of it (the first downhill half!) and the second half is pretty hard, but it works out the muscles. As you can see by my cadence line, I had 4 reductions in cadence (aka walking!) One of them was waiting for traffic, one was the turn around at the half waiting to cross the road, and I will admit.....two of them were slowing down to a fast walk. Those two are pretty evident because they are on the way up the hill! This is a 4 mile route that is right off my house, so its very easy to schedule it in. I have a second run I sometimes do, but it significantly harder, and is 1.5 miles from my house. This adds three miles to my run, so until my hill run's climb to 7 miles (which they unfortunantly do, but not for at least three more weeks) Ill keep on the run I'm doing or do some trail run's I know of that have hills.

This graph also gives a pretty good indication of how this Polar I have works. As you can see, there is a line for HR which is nearer to the top and flatter except for area's where I started walking. The purple line is for elevation changes. I like that the watch gives you the ability to turn off the feature. If you have to run inside on the dreadmill, you can disable it so it doesnt crowd out the graph. Also, the watch has a finite amount of memory, and this helps to ensure you can save more to the watch. (it all uploads to the software eventually, and at that point you can erase the exercise one by one or all at once) The green line is the cadence monitor, or how fast your feet are turning over. The blue line is how fast your running it per mile. (Im sure you can change that per kilometer if you wanted. My FAVORITE part is the ability to pick out specific data (such as speed) and graph that over time. You can then see if your improving on your training. You can also do this for max heart-rate, average heart-rate, calories, energy expenditure, or any one of many other specific set's of data.

I have really decided to lay off of the racing for a little bit. My next race is the Crim 10 mile run in Flint at the end of August. As I've officially started my marathon running schedule, my mileage is going to start to ramp up and I don't feel like its probably very good to race that hard during training. (unless it happens to fall on a high mileage day) The Crim happens to fall on a day where I have a 15 mile long run, so I'm going to adjust my running that day that particular day to make it work.

As for the marathon running schedule, it's going well....better then I expected . I was expecting my legs would be sore but other then residual light quad soreness from the hill running, I feel pretty good. I already run 12 miles this week, and have a 4-mile 9-10:00/mile run today and a 9-mile run on Saturday. The 9-mile run is also supposed to be around the 10:08/mile timeframe, and we will have to see how that goes. I tend to run about a minute faster per mile then I should, so I'm going to have to really work at slowing down on the long runs. Typically, I take off too fast and run half of it about a minute per mile faster. The last half I end up walking in a couple points typically, and even though the run comes in at the goal pace, I don't know how well that is helping me out right now.

Well, that's it for now! Unless something dramatic happens, Ill continue to post about once a week and more during races and hopefully this training keeps going to way it has!