Beach!

So I spent the second week of August at the Jersey shore with some friends. We rented a house and spent the week swimming, hanging out on the beach, eating clam chowder, and, of course, running. Here are some photos from an early-morning run on the sand:

Just after sunrise

Some of my friends were there already watching the sun rise, so they took a picture of me before my run.


I heart sandpipers!


I had no idea how far I was running. In my mind, I wanted to run until I could see the Barnegat Lighthouse in the distance. Every once in a while I left the water's edge to climb up on a life-guard stand and scope out the horizon. Below is the view from the stand, where the lighthouse is just barely visible. It was actually clearer in person.

I ended up running 8.4 miles that day. On the way back, my IT band was aching from running on the steeply-slanted shore, so I took my shoes off and felt better immediately. When I reached the beach entrance to get back to the house, I jumped in the ocean and let it splash my legs. It felt great!

So there is my very un-Jersey Shore-ish experience at the Jersey shore. It was a great time and a great opportunity to get some barefoot running in on the sand. My legs have been feeling really good lately, so I hope to be doing a lot more running this fall.

Back to work

Last weekend, I got back from a week-long vacation at the Jersey shore. It was a great time - completely devoid of fist pumping and poufy hair - and I have some great photos to post from my two early-morning runs.

Although I had good intentions in running in the mornings, I still ate lots of not-so-healthy food and planned on making it up by exercising more when I got home. I came down with a cold though (who gets a cold at the beach?!) and only yesterday did I manage to get out for a short run. It wasn't much, but it made me feel energized throughout the whole day, and I'm thinking about getting up super early while it's still summer and running before work as often as possible. I guess that will depend on how early I can get to sleep the night before!

Anyway, I have pictures and details from the vacation that I will post later. You really can't get much better than a sunrise run along the ocean on the east coast! For now it's back to work...

Morning run

I set my alarm for 6:30 am so I could go for a 4.5-miler this morning. I thought it would be a good distance to get used to doing every Tuesday (since my shift at work starts a little late on Tuesdays).

Definitely didn't get up at 6:30 though. By 7, I finally dragged my sleepy self out of bed but didn't want to run. I forced myself into running clothes and said I'd do something athletic, and I ended up putting on the FiveFingers and going for a 2-miler.

I ran about 1.25 last night and was dragging the whole way, and this morning my IT bands were a little sore, so I stretched, and I think the FiveFingers were a good change, because my legs are feeling pretty good now. On the run, I started off feeling tired, but I picked up the speed for some intervals, and that seemed to energize me. It was cooler out than last night, and I love how light the FiveFingers make your feet feel. The 2 miles went by pretty quickly, and when I got home, I spent a little time on the bike trainer before hopping in the shower and getting ready for work.

I was happy to notice that my arches weren't sore at all with the FiveFingers, which means that my feet are adapting to them very well. It won't be long before I can wear them for a 5k.

I'm definitely out of my usual running shape, but it feels good to get out and be active, and as long as I can convince myself to put the running clothes on and take those first few steps, I'll get that fitness back.

Working my way back

Biking, hiking, kayaking, swimming, canoeing, and finally running: I'm getting back to my usual summer activities.

Thanks to overdoing it over Memorial Day weekend, I was set back a lot, but I'm finally back in the game and am thinking seriously about training for some races and epic outdoor adventures.

I ran 4.5 with my running buddy last week and was pretty out of shape, but I'm going to be exercising regularly now that the knee/IT band issues seem to have mostly cleared up. I'm also trying to get some saddle time on the bike. I went out for a morning ride on Saturday and had a nice 17-mile ride that didn't feel difficult at all. One of my friends suggested a ride on tow-paths and canal paths that, if done there and back, would be almost 50 miles. I know that I can do 20 easily right now, so with some practice I could probably handle 50 in the next month. Right? So I'm hoping for an epic 50 mile bike ride and definitely some running races this fall. So here's to getting out and active and actually remembering to log on and blog about it!

Falling in the river, Fivefingers, and more.

So I fell out of the blogosphere for a while, but I certainly kept myself busy. Since I last wrote, I've run three more races, two of which I placed in my age group. I also went hog wild in a local running store and got lots of great new gear - including a pair of Vibram FiveFingers. Yes, I finally caved in and bought them! And they're awesome!

Let's see, then I agreed to run 11 miles with a running buddy - the farthest I've run since the half-marathon last year - and followed that with a 15-mile hike the next day. I was so proud of myself for being able to run it, but the hiking the next day was too much, and made my IT band and knee a little problematic.

One of the races I mentioned was a 4-mile trail run, which was held by my town's environmental commission in conjunction with an Earth Day festival. In addition to the race, they held guided canoe tours on the river, and loving kayaking but never having been in a canoe, I thought that I'd try it out. I was put in a boat along with a gentleman about my father's age who asked that I steer because he had a weak wrist. I didn't mind, but that meant that he sat in the front and I sat in the back, which was not an even distribution of weight. When we got out on the river, the current was pretty strong, and I didn't have to do much paddling, but there was a lot of work going into steering due to a lot of downed trees in the river. It was really beautiful, and I wished that we could have gone a little slower to enjoy the scenery even more. I got very nervous every time we came near rocks in the water or had to maneuver around trees, especially because my boat-mate and I didn't have much of a communication system worked out for steering and paddling, but we didn't have any collisions. We were just about to the end of our trip when the river branched out into two directions, and I lost sight of the guide ahead of us. There was a lot of debris in the water here, and I didn't know quite where to go. The current carried us along, and I realized a little too late that it was going to take us right into a tree. I started to paddle ferociously to get us to turn and probably would have succeeded if, all at once, the water didn't disappear from under my paddle as we hit a sand bar. It happened so quickly that there was nothing I could do. We ran aground, tipped over, and fell right into the river all in one fell swoop!

Hey, if I didn't tip us, there wouldn't be a fun story to tell, would there?

So those are some highlights from the past few months. I'll have to get back into blogging, because once my IT band/knee start feeling better, I want to train for another half. A full marathon still seems like it might kill me (or at least cause lasting injury), but a half is definitely very doable.

Now that I've buried my old PR...

Have you ever been in this scenario:
You want to buy something, but you really can't afford it or justify the expense, so you think up some impossible thing that can only happen with a miracle and say that if that thing happens, you'll make the purchase?

That's what I did last week when I was looking to buy the HBO series Six Feet Under on DVD. It was $110, which is pricey, but I told myself that I'd deserve it if a miracle happened and I broke my 5K PR in the first race of the year without training or preparing at all for it. And there wasn't much chance of that happening...I thought. Now here we are, 50 seconds faster than my record, and I'm deciding not just if I should spend $110, but if I should spend $190 on the larger gift set (which is supposed to protect the discs better than the thinner, less-expensive packaging).

Decisions, decisions.

I will end up getting it one way or another, not just because I promised it to myself as a reward, but because in a weird way, the show has had a significant impact on how I appreciate life, and I never want to forget how important that is.

I had originally just watched a few episodes from season 5 in which Chris Messina made appearances as a secondary character, and when I got to the end of the season (and incidentally the series), I was really affected. It stuck with me for months, and I ended up going back and watching the entire series, which moved me even more to try and get out and appreciate life while I have it.

RIP former personal record!

Goodbye 25:xx+ finishing times.

Goodbye 8:xx+ paces.

RIP my former personal record in the 5K!

Today I ran the Foxtrot 5K to raise money for Parkinson's research and had an awesome race. To be honest, I expected for it to be awful. In January, I started a new exercise regimen with very little running, and since then I've done almost nothing to prepare for flat, fast, road running. And when I ran this course last September, it was with a hugely disappointing time of 27:54, which is just about a personal worst. Awful, this was not, though. Apparently the exercise routine is perfect for me, seeing as it has resulted in a huge improvement in my finishing time: 24:26 (for a pace of 7:51 per mile), which is 50 seconds better than my last official PR!

Since I haven't been running consistently, I had no expectations coming into this race. I didn't even know it was happening until 2 weeks ago. There was one person who had run it last year who I wanted to beat if she ran it again, but that was my only goal.

When the race began, I started at a pretty fast pace. I had been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" (yes, I freely admit it - it's like an anthem for runners - especially in NJ!) and played it over in my head to stay pumped up. I waved and gave a thumbs up to volunteers and people watching from their houses and enjoyed what was turning out to be a very nice day. It was chilly, but the fog that had covered the town that morning was beginning to lift, making for a sunny day.

My first mile was in 7:30 minutes, and at that point, I felt pretty good. I figured that if I could maintain that pace, I could set a new PR. I began to feel tired at the halfway point, and I know I began to slow down there. A few people passed me, but I hung on and kept going. I played a few different songs over in my head and tried to catch my breath without slowing down too much. With about a half mile to go, a girl about my age passed me. I knew that I was probably giving up a placement in an age group category, but I was giving it my all and couldn't summon up any more speed to pass her. When the finish was in sight, I was able to pick up the pace, but I didn't have a sprint in me. My main focus was the clock. I was shocked to see that I was probably going to come in under 24 minutes and 30 seconds.

And that was it. I crossed the finish with unimaginable triumph gasping for air like a smoker climbing stairs. The combination of my fingers being frozen from the cold and shaking from oxygen deprivation made it a little hard for me to remove the tearaway strip with my name and age from my bib, but I managed to get it off and made my way through the chute without incident. I finished only 6 seconds behind the girl who passed me.

As if unexpectedly breaking my personal record by so much wasn't good enough, I was surprised again by winning a free raffle. The prize was a $25 gift certificate to a running store! Could my day get much better? But wait! It could! I was second in my age group - 6 seconds away from being first - and received a medal. I was so pleased because I really felt that I deserved it after running so hard. It was an awesome run, and it benefited an important cause.

The run was in support of the Michael J. Fox Foundation. An elderly library patron who has Parkinson's Disease was there and participated in the 1-mile walk, and you can tell that the fundraiser meant a lot to him. I just wish that more people could have participated. There were so many community volunteers who had worked to promote it and put it on, and I think that there were only 60 or 70 runners who participated. Maybe I can persuade some of my runner friends to come along next year.