Sunday, February 12, 2012

insert witty title here...

How about that, I blink my eyes and a few more weeks go by without an
update. Life has been pretty chaotic (in a bad way) and blogging hasn't been on my mind at all lately. The chaos peaked the Friday before the Bridle Trails race which meant that I had to miss it sadly. I ran the course Friday at lunch and it was a mess with downed branches everywhere. I picked them up and moved them off of the trail as I ran around the perimeter. The only thing I couldn't move was a fully tree that was blocking the East perimeter. I would have needed a saw and an hour or more to drag the pieces off of the trail. I was hoping that the park ranger would have time to do that but instead the course was re-routed to use a parallel interior trail for the East section. I was a bummed to hear that but I wasn't running the race.

I've been missing a few runs here and there due to my workload at the office and at home. I've been putting up weeks of:

31, 29, 28, and 26 miles over the last month.

Most of my runs have been around the Bridle Trails and the streets of Redmond. They've been lackluster with the exception of two tempo workouts I did. One was last weekend, I warmed up for 10 min and then ran alternating rounds of 10min hard, 8min easy. I surprised myself by running mid-6min miles during the hard sections which is good for me considering the hilly nature of the streets around home. The other was a 5K run I did on the treadmill at the gym. I started at 7:30/mi pace and kept lowering the incline on the treadmill and my pace as well. By the end I was running at a 3.0% decline and just under 6:00/mi. I just missed breaking 20 min. for the run which was pretty good after having lifted weights for half an hour and for how slow I started out.

I've been putting in most of my miles in the New Balance MT110 shoes which are great so far. The sizing isn't as big and roomy as I'd like and I'm considering ordering a pair in a wider size to see if that feels more comfortable. The sizing isn't that bad but all of my running socks are DryMax heavy-duty trail socks which are quite bulky. I tried wearing the MT110s sockless once but there was something wrong with the fabric where the upper meets the footbed on the outside edge of one foot that gave me a blister after about 5 miles unfortunately. The traction and cushion of the shoes is great. They don't jump out and scream "FANTASTIC!" but they're nice shoes so far. I still like the feel of the Merrell Trail Gloves the best of all of the shoes I've owned. I'm interested in trying their new Bare Access model but I've heard a few bad things about them from the folks at Born To Run (the store, not the book) saying that they have no barefoot feel to them and that they have built up arches. I'm still curious to try them as the lack of cushion is the thing stopping me from running farther than about 10 miles in my Trail Gloves.

To summarize:
- not running as much as I'd like to.
- Not feeling as good as I'd like to on my runs.
- MT110s are good but not fantastic (yet?).