Thor's Running Journal

Nothing fancy today. Ran through the cemetery and past Bill's barbershop. I made it a quasi-out and back, which is a bit unusual, but it felt interesting because of difference between each side of the street and the variation in the views going North to south verse south to north. I ended up hitting my stride about mile 6 which is a little late when only doing a prescribed 8 miles. The 16 mile run tomorrow stayed in my mind and kept me from trying to push things today. I won't call my legs rested, but some of the niggles of my right hamstring that have been hanging around lately seem to have resolved. Running through the cemetery is about as dark as it gets. There are lights on in the mausoleum and I have wondered before if it is open even at the odd hours I come swinging through, but I've never stopped to check the doors.   

 I retraced my steps and found the mitten that fell out of my pocket yesterday. You would think I would have learned my lesson to zip up my pockets, but alas, I just shove them in my coat and presume they will stay put. It didn't take many steps to find, but when I did it felt stiff as a board from being on the frozen ground for the past 24 hours. In another couple weeks I'll be able to leave the mittens at home. In other news, a art project I've been working on for the past several years is coming very close to completion. It is one thing to have an idea and a whole other thing to move the idea through the stages needed to reach completion.  When I started running longer distances I used mapping software to create GPS art. It made for cool strava maps, but I wanted to bring them into a tangible space. With some help from additional mapping programs, I managed to form large scale images of the routes that showed individual houses and then set them up in full color. This wee...

Some days are harder than others. That's just the way it goes. I know that even my broken sleep felt extra broken this morning. I looked at the clock at 11:30pm and decided it was too early to go out and fell back asleep. I dreamed until the second time I looked at the clock and saw it was 1:30pm. I considered waiting a few more hours, but figured it wouldn't be getting any better outside and I might as well go.  Another marathon practice pace run and another ridiculously windy day with pelting bits of snow. I gave up listening to anything during my runs for lent so the sound of the wind whipping through the tops of the trees and down the streets came at me at full volume. Honestly the splits didn't end up being as bad as I thought, but the effort to get them felt disproportionately higher than usual. I took a few pauses and never really felt settled in to the run. Every half mile felt like a fight. Probably because it was.  But I didn't give up. I fought back.  Makin...

Strength workouts started today.  2mi warm up x6(1mi @mp-10, 400m recovery) 2mi cool down I took a pretty straight shot out Shattuck turned into the neighborhood just on the other side of the I-675 overpass, and then circled back around to take Wiess most of the way back home. Pretty straight forward little route other than some indecision about going north or south on Michigan Ave. Thankfully I realized that if I went north I would have to come up over the McCarty hill, and I just didn't want to deal with that this morning. Maybe if I make it to Boston and need hill work I'll do that more often, but today I just wanted to successfully complete the work. The first time I did this workout was back in August and the thermometer read 77 degrees at 3am in the morning. Too hot. I crashed on the 5th interval and just couldn't pull off the 6th in the way I wanted to. I felt frustrated at the time. I redeemed my self when it came around the second time a few weeks later. This time ...

The dark around here isn't really dark. It's also interesting to consider that the night isn't really black. It is naïve to think of the night in the city/suburbs as black. It is too simple. Perhaps if a child needed to depict the night with a crayon he or she would reach for the darkest color in the box, but in reality the environment is more complicated.  The darkness is filled with color light comes in all kinds of hues. Obviously this is apparent throughout the Christmas season, but even just everyday street lights add to the color of the darkness. Any given run is filled with yellows, blues, purples, greens, and everything in between. The variation is one more thing that makes running outside more interesting.  10 miles @7:48 . A little too fast, but felt ok. Heart rate (by wrist monitor so taken with a grain of salt) stayed around 151. 

  The thaw started this week. It breathed new life into my eagerness to run. I wore shorts again for the first time in months. The sound of song birds started to return. The piles of snow turn into puddles on the sidewalks. It only all lasted about 2 days before another blast of cold air hit, but it was enough to add a little fire to my training Im across the halfway point of my training now. Only 8 more weeks until marathon day. A momentous moment, but the highest mileage is yet to come. Ive been toying around just under 50 miles per week up to this point, but now 50+ will become the norm peaking over 60.  Make no mistake, 50 miles a week is a lot of time on the feet, but it came incrementally. First a 5k then 10k then half marathon before aiming for a full marathon. Even then, the training has been progressive and getting comfortable with running at this level took two years. Its been said that the marathon is the last 26.2 miles of a thousand mile run. There’s a lot of trut...

 I could hear windchimes all over the neighborhoods today as the wind swept the streets. The music from windchimes always adds a sensory element to runs that is musical, calming, and although unpredictable, a welcome part of any run. With the thaw, I could also start to run through neighborhoods again and not just along the main streets. Felt fun.