Rusty's Blog

First of all, I don’t think my c25k program should be considered entirely successful. First of all while I did my final ‘run’ tonight, I didn’t run 30 min, and wasn’t really expecting to. In a way this is really a new program that I started, though I doubt that I am the only one to have done something like this.

My short term objective is to run a 5K a week from Saturday. I’ve got just under 2 weeks to do this. I actually have a 5k ‘course’ in my neighborhood that I am going to be ‘training’ on. It’s actually just barely short of a 5k loop, but I will be able to use it, and the walk in/out for the loop will take care of the rest I’m pretty sure.

Tonight I walked and ran the course in about 40 min. My immediate goal is to bring the time down from 40 min to under 30 min. As the final run of week 8 shows, I can run 28 min straight on a flat surface, and I suspect that with little effort I can turn that into 30 min as part of my current program. However I’m pretty sure that I’m not running a mile and a half out, and a mile and a half back as part of that 30 min, which means I need to deal with the distance as well in the next two weeks.

I wrote once a wile back of my running when I was stationed overseas. The compound we were stationed on had a perimiter of about a mile, give or take a bit. And I had a lot of spare time. My unit was scheduled to redeploy back to the US a couple of months after we got to the compound. Some of the people I was stationed there with spent their time on the roof of our building, developing a tan, and in some cases working out with weights, either improvised, or purchased on the local market. I was never really a weight training sort of a guy, so I didn’t get involved in that, and as a geek, a tan has never really been something I’ve chased after. The last time I ‘tanned’ I turned orange. I’m pretty sure I can explain the story somewhere along the line, if people show a serious interest in it, but it’s really a different story.

In any case I, as well as a few other somewhat independent types, took to walking and running around the compund. Walk for a bit, run for a while, walk a block, run for a while, etc. After a wek or so of this, you realize you are running the entire distance around the compound, a couple of weeks later, you’re doing laps. If you’re really dedicated, or just don’t have anything better to do, you run in the morning and the evening.

Of course the army being what it is, can’t quite leave well enough alone. 4 or 5 weeks into people doing this, some 1LT gets the bright idea to hold a ‘race.’ Invitations are posted all over the compound. Oddly enough about 3 days before the event, I spraign an ankle. I’m in a walking splint the day of the race, so I didn’t get to participate. Funny how some things work out that way.

I really didn’t want to race anyway. I think I had taken up the running to try to impress someone, and after a while I realized I wasn’t going to impress them, but I was gaining secondary advantages.

When I was called up for deployment, I think I weighed in at 210. They needed me, and I was able to complete the PT requirements (which I don’t think I could right now) and I lost the 10 or 11 lb they needed me to in order to pass the required limits for my age and height. (They may have done a basic body fat analys as well, I don’t remember.)

When I returned to the US, I weighed in at 180, and people who looked at my ID from when I was deployed generally agreed that I didn’t look like that any more.

Fast forward to today. I weigh more than I did when I was deployed. Actually I weigh more than I did when I started the c25k program. Part of that is the fact that I haven’t really changed my dietary habits much over the past 2 months, so I am probably eating more callories than I need to. Of course part of the weight gain is probably just the normal fluctuations in body weight from day to day, and I think the variation may also be the selection of clothing I wore to the doctor’s office. (not the lightest weight materials, since I rode the motorcycle over.)

That said, my endurance is up segnificantly. So the current program is to take a known distance, one of a few, and start working on improving my run for both distance, and time.

Tonight I walked and ran a 3 mile loop in about 40 min. I’ll do the same loop first thing in the morning, and again tomorrow evening (or night) and I’m aiming for completing the loop in about 38 min or less. I think I can easily cut 2 min off the time overnight. Over the next week I am going to continue doing this and I’m aiming to get down to under 30 min for the loop by the end of the week. That’s a tougher goal, and might not be feasable. We’ll see. I’m then going to add half a mile to the timed distance, which I’m hoping that by Thursday morning of next week I’ll have in under 35 min. At that point I’m going to take a break for a day to prepare for the run on Saturday morning. I may walk Friday night, just to keep my circulation up, but it will be a much shorter distance.

One of the reasons I’m taking this route is that the run I did for 28 min was almost entirely on a flat surface. I did add a short (2 blocks) hilll at the end of the run, but I have no confidence that where the 5k will be run at the end of next week, will be on a level route. Minniapolis has many places where you can run on a level surface for miles if you wish, but in most cases just feet to your left or right you can find a route that is either one long slow rise, or one short steep hill. I don’t know that the route that I am working myself through now demonstrates all of those features, but there are hills, as well as some long flat areas. I can easily come up with alternate routes that have steeper hills, as well as some routes that have long shallow rises.

By the end of the summer, I’m hoping to build my endurance up to run about 5 miles. Who knows, I may hit that objective by the end of July, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t know what my next objective will be. I”ve never been interested in running a marathon, and I don’t think I will take up that challenge. I think it would be a lot better to start with the plan of running 5 miles a day 3 days a week as a long term objective, with 2 or 3 days a week also visiting the Gym. If I get to the point of running 3 hours a week, and working out in the gym 2 or 3 hours a week, I think I’ll be more than happy.

As bad weather kicks in this fall, I will probably be migrating my runs to the gym on a treadmill. My life at the moment is no where near as dull as sitting on a compund in the desert. for 3 months. But I strongly suspect that the health benifits of the routine will be worth it.

C25K is a great program. the ‘Frist day to 5K’ podcasts are a great way to give yourself targets to stick with and a interval training routine to work within. Feel freeto use it, but remember to talk with your doctor before you start any workout routine. I would also advise talking to him or her before you do any significant modification to your workout regine. Rembember that the real reason to do this stuff is to be in better shape, have more fun, and be able to meet and handle chalenges that come your way. It’s work, but you’ll find it’s worth it.

I seem to forget each week that the reason I am doing this is to get better. This week the ‘improvement’ to meet was simply 3 more minutes than I ran last week. This next week it’s just running 2 more minutes. While I won’t call today’s run ‘easy’ by any means, it definately was doable. I might even have been able to complete it yesteday, though I got several other things done yesterday, so I shan’t complain.

Walking out to gegin the run is a bit interesting these days. It’s almost as if a part of me doesn’t want to do this. Oh, I’m not talking about the psychological battle looking at running 28 min, or 30, or trying to complete a 5k run. What I’m talking about is things like as I’m walking out, feeling like something is in my shoe, or in my sock. Maybe some sand, or smething. That said, once I start the music for the run, I don’t have that difficulty.

Since it has been a couple of days since I last ran, Friday evening in fact, I could feel the tightness of my legs as I started. Oh, not the same tightness as not having stretched, more along the lines of muscles realizing that they are going to have to do some work now.

The watch I regularly wear these days has a stopwatch function, though it can be difficult to use at times. Amoung the anoyances are the start/stop button does have a tendency to not start, or stop the stopwatch. The minute display is small and difficult to read, (is that 7, or 8?) but it’s on the watch, so it’s generally available. I chose not to take either a GPS, or a phone with me today, I went back to my simple MP3 Player, loaded up with the one track for week 8, and along with my keys that’s about all I took with me today. It’s not a mater of running light, just that today I decided that I didn’t really need to carry all that much that could confuse what I am doing. After all I’m going out to run, not really test new geek toys.

I had initially picked a turn around point that was about where I turned around last Friday. It’s a good point to turn around once I have my time up to where I want it and can start working on my speed a bit more. But as I was running I had a cood couple of minutes before I would have gotten there, and I looked at my watch and realized that not only did I not need to go that far, but that I was already close to my turnaround time. So where a fork in the trail existed, I turned around and started heading back.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I hate hills. Well, I realize that inthe long term I’m going to have to deal with them, and occasionally running up, and down them is going to happen. I got to about 2 minutes from the end of my run and off to my right was a long gentle sloap. I decided that rather thna run along the flat, and since I was that close to the end of my run, that I could probably handle running up that slope. Adn when I got to the top I realized I still had some time left, and off to my left was even more up-hill, if not nearly as steep. So I went that way till the end of run indicator came up. And my run was done.

Oh, my day is far from over. I’ll be heading to the gym this afternoon for another hour of workout, but I met the objective for this morning, and this week, even if it was longer than I like, so Onward.

Have fun, go run!

Questions is right. Well, I ran today, and I felt a lot better about it while running than on Wednesday, but still working out sore muscles and such from the Tuesday Gym Experience. Going there again tomorrow, thoug I have not heard about pricing, so I may notactually be working with a trainier tomorrow. We’ll see. Then another runon  Sunday. (Monday?)

Worst today was probably the feeling of wanting to have somethingto drink (water) I didn’t have a need to get something to drink (thirsty) but knew that that was in the cards at some point. The conversion from drinking Diet Mt. Dew to non-carbonated, no caffine beverages is taking it’s own time, but is happening.

Hardware problems today. Hardly something unusuall, but it did affect my routine. I didn’t want to be carying around a mic on the headphones today, not that it’s obtrusive or anthing,but the headphones that came with the cell phone have a button on them that switches the headphones from audio playback to ‘phone’ mode headsets. I suppose if you are out at the park, sitting watching the birds and the dogs, that being able to press a button to answer the phone is nice. I’m not really happy with it though. I think one of the problems I may have been having on Wednesday may have been tied to that, as the dial pad was one of the things that I was seeing on the screen andI don’t think that that was a shake managed device, or app. In any case the problem today appears to be related to the headphone adapter for my phone. It appears thatit is not providing a solid contact for the headphones at some level. The headphones would sound really distorted, which I otherwise would have thought of as a problem with the playback codec needing to be reset. In fact I even power cycled the phone to see if that would help. No good. I finally realized that I was hearingdifferent results as I actually moved the headphone plug around with the adapter. So I appear to have a faulty adapter (headphones have been working in other devices, but I won’t entirely rule them out either.) Most anoying was that Buddy Runner was trying to give me status points and i could hear that it was ’saying’ something, but not hear what was being said.

In all I suspect that I would have been better off without the headphones at all. I may even give that a go.

Nope, didn’t complete the run today. Though I think I did better than Wednesday. I’m contemplating repeating this week, or even going back and repeating week 7 again, though I think I completed that week acceptably. I had been thinking that this week was 30 min of running, but it’s only 28. Next week should be 30. It doesn’t seem like a huge step to add 3 minutes of running to what I did last week, but then the conditions are a bit different this week as well, with the workout at the gym.

Oh, well, enough for now. Have to get cleaned up for work, and if I have time, stop in and pick up a pair of shoes and shorts for the gym. Not really interested in wearing the running shorts again, though the style is OK. (I really need to add to my exercise wardrobe.)

Stay safe. Run. (28 days to the 5k!)

…not just longer.

As the astute reader will note, I’ve been participating in C25K. Today I started Week 8. I was originally planning on doing that on Tuesday this week, but last week I signed up for a session at “The Gym” with a personal trainer, and I wanted to be able to focus on that yesterday, an drecovering from a run would not have helped.

So I did what I could of the run today. Since I had been at the gym yesterday, and worked fairly rigourously on a full body workout, I’m actually recovering from that a bit today as well. Not so happy about that.

The work out started well enough. Other than whatever is going on with my phone. I think I will need to discard a feature that I installed a couple of weeks back. First I listen to the podrunner intervals podcast with the phone, and that seems to work out OK. I also added the Buddy Runner app to the phone a while back, in the hopes that I would be able to use that to keep track of my running progress. So far so good. Somewhere along the line I also added a ’shake’ app manager. The idea is neat, want to switch to a different app that’s running? No problem, shake the phone. Well, there is a bit of a problem. Shaking the phone is almost a given when running.

So I started the podcast. got the buddy runner app launched, and ready for me to hit the ’start’ button as I’m doing my warm up walk. I get to the end of the 5 min walk, reach over to hit the ’start’ button, and… that’s not the buddy runner app. Ok, rip the phone off the upper arm. Close a bunch of apps that I had not intentionally opened, and finally There! I can start buddy runner. All the while I’m trying to both manage the phone and run. Not a good combination.

I headed south on the lake today, and one of the things that Buddy Runner does is gives you status updates for where you are on the run. I got a half mile update, followed by a 1 mile update. I go along to where I planned on doing my turn around, and start comming back, and realize that I should have gotten another update. OK, pull off the phone, App close, app close, app close, … Ah, buddy runner isn’t tracking any more. Wonderful.

I don’t think I got a full 2 miles into the run before I switched to walking. I am not sure if the reason that buddy runner stopped tracking was because I had gone 1 mile, or if there was something else happening. We’ll see now that I’ve removed the shake based task manager.

While I think that part of my early drop was due to the recovery from the workout at the gym yesterday, I do note that while running, and in the walk before and after, I actually felt a bit more fit. I’ve got sore arms, legs, and so on, but they are mostly good sore, rather than incredibly painful sore. We’ll see how the run goes on Friday after I’ve had a full day of recovery.

Well, today is more of a success than even Friday was. I did get all 25 min of running done. I’ll admit that it is still more of a jog than a run, but for now the important part for me is to get the duration up.  The distance will come soon enough.

I changed things up a bit today, in that I decided that there was no real reason for me to drive to my running course. My walk in was a bit longer than 5 min, and I started the audio for the walk a bit later than I would have liked, as I would like to have started the run just about the time I got on the trail, rather than about 2 min later. I did start my GPS track when I got to the trail.The first 11 track points appear to be from walking, as do the final 4 or 5. Apparently there is a spot on the path where GPS readings are a bit suspect. While there is a hill on the path, the variation in the altitude for this rout really is only about 30 to 40 feet, and almost all of that is at the north end of the route I took today. So when you look at the track around the lower right hand portion of the path, and see me running at over 40 miles per hours, 80 feet under water, I would advise treating those readings with a bit of suspicion. (If I can find a way to discard such readings in the future, I probably will.)

I mentioned elsewhere that I really hate hills. I guess that at some level I can’t get away from them. I suppose I could move to a location with miles and miles of nothing but flat ground, but since I don’t live there, and I expect that I will have to run on hills for some of the 5k events in the future, I’ll just have to live with them.

In any case as I mentioned there is a small hill on the north end of this run. I would be surprised if the height over the rest of the route were more than 25 feet or so, but it is there, and aproaching it from the south, I was more than happy that I was hitting it before my midpoint. It did feel better running back down it to the south than it did going up it to the north, but I was just as happy I hadn’t decided to go much further than that hill to the north.

I wasn’t exactly sure where my second turn around point should be. However I figured that if I went past the parking lot, that I would be fairly close to 25 min by the time I got back to where I got on the path. In fact it worked out fairly well, and left me with a route off the path that made my walk home a bit shorter.

The feeling of completing that 25 min of running, hearing the tones indicating that 25 min is done, was wonderful. I had done what I set out to do, and I felt good. Oh, I don’t know that I could have run another 5 min quite yet, but we shall see on Tuesday. No matter what, I consider this a successfull completion for Week 7.

The astute reader will probably note that I didn’t blog about running on Monday as my schedule suggests I should have. They will probably also note that today is listed as session 1 for the week, rather than session 2. They are right.

After my drive on Sunday, and return, I slpet fairly late Monday morning, and ended up being awake for about 4 hours in the middle of the day, and another few hours after 8 at night. I don’t think that the miss was a total loss, as the idea of the schedule is to run three times a week, rather than a 3 – 4 – 3 – 4 cycle. I’m going to be a day behind this week, but I’m not too worried about it.

I tried a different application for tracking running this week. A couple of weeks back I ordered an arm band for my G1 and that came in yesterday. I’m going to have to mod it yet, as the headphones that came with the phone are not a good match for the headphone jack on the G1. It appears that it would be a good armband for an iPod touch or possibly an iPhone as well if someone is looking for one. Picked up on eBay for something like 5.00 and 4.99 shipping. I ordered 2. The kit comes with both a neoprene armband as well as a plastic waterproof case with it’s own arm band, and a lanyard for wear around your neck. Nice I suppose if you are going snorkling, as it’s rated for up to 5 meters, but I hadn’t really been planing on taking my phone swimming with me, and I suspect it would not work well as an underwater speakerphone.

One of the objectives was to use buddy runner on my cell phone to track my running session. It’s designed to use the built in GPS and such to keep track of speed and position. I’m a bit bothered by the fact that once you hit ’start’ on applications like this, if it tells you that you need to activate the GPS and cell location system, that it doesn’t recognize that you’ve done that and actually start when you get back to the application. In other words when I got done with my run today I discovered that I did not have a track of my running experience on the phone. Oh well.

Another mod I have to do to the case is punch a hole for the camera. One of the add-in’s on my phone uses the camera to determine the ambient light level, and if it deams the light level as ‘dark’ it dims the backlight on the phone. That kind of makes it hard to read the screen while it’s in the armband. I’m not sure how much tood that will do, as the armband may be holding the camera it self up to my arm, but the neoprene certainly isn’t letting much light in.

The run itself today was a bit worse than last Saturday. I followed the same basic course. The weather was significantly warmer, with relatively high winds. For the most part those winds were cross to my path, and much of my path has tree cover along the sides of the path to act as a wind buffer. The down side is that the wind increased evaporation, and the heat took it’s toll. I didn’t run even as well as I did Saturday, which in my opinion was no great shakes. That said, I think I got further on my way back on my final running attempt than I had on Saturday. Hoping that Friday afternoon’s workout ends up going even better. At the very least, it looks to be cooler.

I’m begining to wonder if it is going to be taking me longer than the 9 weeks the course is designed to get up to the distance and speed I should be going. I certainly don’t think that I’m ‘failing’ the course, as I have seen significant improvements in my endurance and my abilities in other areas. But it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m on ‘track’ for completing in 9 weeks. That said, I should be well on my way, and having registered for a 5k run this summer, I’m going to be working at making it happen by the time of the run.

I’m only 44 (45 a week after the week 9 cutoff) I may not be the 25 year old who takes the c25k experience and turns it into a lifelong career of running marathons, but I’m not quite dead yet either. And I’m working to make this go even better.

Stay safe.

I should have gotten another hour or two of sleep.

Never really a good blog begining when the subject is week 6’s wrapup session for c25k, is it? Not all that much I can do about it though, it’s a rough weekend for me. My niece graduates tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going to be doing a bit over 500 miles of driving to get there and back so that I can be available for SkyWarn on Monday. I won’t mention what I got for my niece for her graduation present, but I had to pick that up this morning, as well as make sure that the car was ready to go (oil change) do a recording of a radio net and helping someone check that they have access to the repeater system as well. I was up after work yesterday until after 11 am today, woke up at just after 3:00 pm and got ready to perform my session.

I could blame the wind, or just being tired. but I don’t know if that’s quite right. In any case it doesn’t really matter why I didn’t get quite as much running done as I would like. I just have to keep at it.

I did get to my turn around point, 12-13 minutes out, but the return was not as well done. I would say that I ran a bit over half the time.

I’m not going to get overly concerned with that unless I don’t see an improvement on Monday morning. It doesn’t matter at this point if I try to ‘re-run’ the session or not, as all of week 7 is the same routine as the final session of week 6. A brisk 5 min walk, followed by a 25 min run. I have great confidence that I will be completing that, and moving on to 28 min, and 30 min sessions the next two weeks. I may not be running a full 5k at that point, but I’ll be able to start from there and start building my speed over the weeks to come.

With all that I have to do this weekend, I really could have used a couple more hours of sleep…

Well, I didn’t go to the lake, but just about the equivalent. For the past several decades, railroad right of way has been being converted into bike and running trails. Now I don’t ever expect to be trying to bike the full series of trails, much les run them, but they do have a couple of nice features for runners.

Unimproved surfaces, actually they are improved over what was there to begin with, tend to be gravel that has not had hundreds of 5,000 lb cars driving over them every week. Improved surfaces tend to be blacktop. Both tend to be easier to run on than concrete (sidewalks) though not as nice as a level grass area.

The other major advantage is that they tend to be very close to flat. Railorads do not like to drag trains up hills, or have to try to slow them down comming down hills. Where they do, accidents tend to happen. One of the early solutions to this was that in general railroads have no more than a 3% grade, and usually under 1%. Now the trails that you can ride and run on beside the tracks don’t always follow those guidelines, but for the most part they tend to have a similar slope.

I was complaining that on both my Week 5 session 3 run, and on my Week 6 session 1 run that I ended up havign to take a break when dealing with running up a longish hill. For me a long hill is one that has an elevation change of greater than 30 feet, over a length of 3 city blocks, without a grade change. So today I ran along a portion of what becomes the Luce line trail further out. As I was running, I was not keeping track of exactly where I was in the interval, time wise. However we tend to be reasonably good at estimating how much further we can go at the current pace, and I was looking out over to the top of the next hill and saying, “Yes, I can make that if I have to.” near the end of each of the 10 min intervals.

So I have to say that today’s intervals went very well, and I’ll be looking to make further use of track-side trails, as well as lake side trails in the near future.

This past week I’ve gotten a couple of offers to join a Gym in the area. They are having a membership drive, and they normally charge $40 a month, pluss a fairly high (more than one month’s dues) sign up fee. To get more people in the gym, they opened 100 registrations up, first come, first serve, for a 2 year membership with a one time fee that equates to pahying $19.95 a month. So I stopped in yesterday, signed up. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning to pay my fee, then my membership starts Monday. In theory I could start earlier, however what I have to do beween now and Monday is going to make it very hard to get in to the Gym even this weekend. Monday is soon enough. In truth, I probably won’t get in till Tuesday, as Monday is a running day for me, and should be session 1 of week 7. (3 more weeks to go!)

If that offer is begining to sound attractive, some people may think it’s excessively high even at $20 a month, check your mail. I suspect that the Gym I joined is not the only one working on building membership.

One of the reasons I joined is that I hope that the upper body, core, back and arm workouts will help with my longer term endurance, and also I’m hoping that I can do some leg work that will help me with those hill climbing runs. The hills that are giving me issues, I don’t think should be doing so in the long term. I’m hoping this will help.

Odd bit of spam that Akismit hit this week. Someone suggested that my blog didn’t display correctly in Firefox. Considering that’s all I look at the blog in, it kind of surprised me. About the only thing that I can think of that really didn’t lay out the way I wanted it to was the caption for my run Sunday. And that was an issue even in the writing. I don’t think that it was a firefox specific problem, but I could be wrong.

Oh, well, Have fun, run, feel great.

We’ll just have to see how this week works out. I was up ‘early’ today for doing a run late in the afternoon. I finally got my session started at about 6:00 PM, only to be stopped within the block I live in to receive a package by UPS. Forgot that I had even purchased the books. Oh well. Restarted and got on my way.

Today was a broken up session compared to Sunday’s run. It started with a fairly short run to get the blood moving, then a walk of about the same length, followed by a long run of about 10 min, (I have not replayed any of the tracks to see what the timings are for intervals) followed by another walk I’m going to say both walks were about 3 min, as was the first run. There was a third run as well, I’m guessing again 3 min. Followed by a walk out.

The midel run I completed without any problems. I am presuming this was because while the altitude changed during the route, there were no really steep hills involved. Just some gentle rolling.

The first run I got as far as I could go, actually to the top of the hill I had run up, broke to a walk for few seconds to recover, started running again, and within seconds the transition tones kicked in.

On the third run I think I was about half way through, again up a hill, but not quite as steep, took a 10 second walking break, and went back to running, and completed the run.

Experienced a few scattered raindrops here and there, nothing significant.

Odd sidenote, I had switched loads in the laundry before I left, planning on quickly switching loads again when I got back. I had a meeting to attend tonight, and I was a little pressed for time (schedule reminder note, plan to do the runs around 4, not 5 in the future when running before work. if not earlier) In fact I was pretty sure that I was not going to get the final load out of the drier. So I walked into the laundry room before I got to my apartment, turned on the light, and saw that I had not pushed the coin tray in to get the dryier started. So I pulled all the stuff out of the washer, added it to the stuff in the dryer, and kicked it off. I need to be up at 8, or a bit earlier in the morning anyway, so what wasn’t dry when I got  home from the meeting, I will run through another cycle in the morning. (No use of the laundry room before 8 am, or after 10 pm.)

I’m guessing that for really long runs, I’m going to really have to work on those up hill runs. At the moment they seem to be the killers for me. Running along a level path, or along a lake side path, is probably not going to be a problem, even for 20 or 30 min runs. It’s getting to the top of the hill that I suspect will keep hurting me.

I may have lost a few choce words in this reverie, as it’s been about 6 hours since I did the run, but that’s what I get for setting up an event of this type so close to doing something where I won’t have the opportunity to blog. We’ll see if Thursday goes better or not.

Contemplating driving to a lakeside path for Thursday, just to see if my observations regarding hills has any validity. Just have to find some way to tag a reasonable turn–around point. I don’t mind being 5 to 10 min away, walking when I’m done, but if I’ve just completed a 30 min series of intervals, with a 5 min warm-up walk, that strikes me as a bad place to walk back from. Ok, just reviewed the schedule, Thursday should be a 5 min walk, 10 min jog, 3 min walk, 10 min jog, ‘done’. Based on that if I turn around at the end of the first 10 min jog, I should be about 2 min away from my starting point if I run at a steady pace. I doubt that the steady pace is likely, but I should still be less than 10 min away. Which works for me. To Medicine Lake it is. (Not sure what to do about Saturday’s walk… Cross that bridge when I get to it I guess.)

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.