Bedford Bound

Training Summary
Sorry this post is so late. Tom always says that life is a conspiracy to keep people from running. Apparently, life has it out for blogging as well. This past week, I was back up to the 80 to 90 miles a week range after being significantly lower last week. I did not meet my goal of doing strides three days (only did them once) but I did work out twice, so I really can't complain. This coming Sunday, I will race the New Bedford Half Marathon. Going into the race, I am uncertain about my fitness level so I will go out conservatively and increase my effort depending on how I feel. 5:30 pace felt comfortable in the workout I did on Sunday so I will try to begin there and see how things go. In all honesty, I'm not expecting much from the race and mostly just want to score for GBTC and help out the team.
I plan on working out on Wednesday evening and just doing mileage every other day. If the weather is nice on Wednesday, I'll head to the track at South Boston and run repeat miles. Otherwise, I'll do a fartlek in Franklin Park. The half marathon will give me a good idea of my fitness and will allow me to pinpoint paces for tempo runs and intervals, which will help me to structure my training for the upcoming months. I still want to try to do strides more often but the reality is that, whenever there is a time crunch, things like strides, stretching, and core strengthening are the first to go.

Monday
70 minutes
Tuesday
100 minutes
Wednesday
90 minutes
Thursday
30 minute warm up, 6 x Franklin Park road loop hill in 1:43 to 1:47, 25 minute cool down
Friday
30 minutes
Saturday
100 minutes
Sunday
35 minute warm up, 6 mile progression run in 5:42, 6:05, 5:55, 5:32, 5:39, 5:34, 50 minute cool down
Total
590 minutes (about 85 miles) in 7 runs

Holler of the Week
Nothing good...but there's warm weather coming. Bring on the taunting!

Epiphany Story of the Week
Last week was a bit of a whirlwind. The only clear memory I have is sitting at my desk trying to grade papers as one of the 5th grade girls tried to convince me that a rhinoceros is a dinosaur and a "triceminotops" is a mammal. Yikes.

Song of the Week
The Gaslight Anthem has been playing on my computer and iPod pretty steadily over the past week. I encourage any of you who didn't look at the video last week to check 'em out. The song for this week is a video made up of sound clips from YouTube looped and mixed together. It is a very clever idea that ends up working quite well. The creator has a webpage where he hosts the songs and accompanies them by videos that are spliced together versions of the YouTube videos.