#rcnovember2016

11/30/16 3.11 miles Another treadmill 5k YTD: 1169.53 miles 334 days in a row

Maybe I’ll just make all the (non-Saturday) days 5ks.

I started out trying to match the mile splits from yesterday. Probably not among the best of my ideas. I’ve got a google spreadsheet that lists all the treadmill speeds and all the corresponding paces:

... so I figured I’d just match the mile splits and be good. Right? So from yesterday that amounts to a mile at 6.8mph, a mile at 7.2mph, and a mile at 7.5mph. After a half mile I could tell it was a bad idea. I started bargaining with myself as far as how closely I’d match the last minute plan. I settled on maintaining the speed through 8/10 of a mile and then dialing back .5mph to finish out the mile. So .8 at 6.9 (yeah I cheated), then .2 at 6.4. I dialed it up to 7.2 for the second mile and kept it until 1.8, then dialed it back to 6.7. By the time mile 2 clicked over, I just didn’t want to go fast again. So I slowed down to 6pmh. And gradually slowed every quarter of a mile after that.

I still ended up with a decent 5k time, and it was only about 2.5 minutes slower than yesterday.

But really, I should know better than to try a hard(ish) effort two days in a row.

About my headphones. They turned on great, paired with my phone. At some point the music stopped - or so I thought - until I realized the song I was on just started again. I think the contacts under the buttons are suffering from a little moisture damage. Then at the end of my workout when I was getting ready for the shower, I couldn’t turn them off. So I just let them stay on.

I intended to try to turn them off again afterwards, but never got around to it. Tried to turn them on after I got home. No dice. Either the button wasn’t working, or they had stayed on and drained the battery. So they’re charging again, and will hopefully work well enough for tomorrow.

Taekwondo with my kids tonight. My wife had a work dinner so couldn’t attend. Pretty low-key class. There’s a belt promotion test next week, so today was really just a session concentrating on things we’d need to know. Which is a little tough to coordinate among the various belt levels, but the instructors today (Mark and Tom) managed fairly well.

Tom had some nice words for me today - in fact he suggested I could try to double promote since (his words) I’m a quick study and seem to be getting this stuff down pretty well. Trouble is I’d need to work on Taegeuk 1 and get it down to the level I’ve got Chun-Ji. Fortunately I’ve found a great tutorial video so I can practice at home.

(I had tried to get my son to help me after dinner, but he was having trouble remembering the exact sequence.)

I’ll have to see if the guy who made a video for Chun-Ji that helped me so much has as helpful a video out for Taegeuk 1, because he specified a lot of things that helped me remember a few things to make it easier.

As silly as his “blinkers” thing is, it’s super helpful.

Quick update of my last 2 November runs. We had a decent snow storm here on Monday so obviously the logical next step was to go run in it lol I ran with a friend of mine and man was it cold. My shoes were covered in snow afterwards (top right picture) but I was so happy to have done it. We did an easy 3 mile loop and made snow angels afterwards (: 

I wasn’t originally planning to run today but knowing that I was really close to hitting 50 miles for the month even though my goal had been 40 I knew I needed to get out there. So, a quick 4.5 mile loop and I’m at 50 miles for the month!! (: 

I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts regarding this weekend. The marathon was on Saturday night so this is a lot late and I still haven’t gathered the courage to publish this.

Let me start by saying I finished the race and that was the ultimate win in the end of that day. By many people standards that’s good enough but this race was so frustrating so… so… I don’t even know man. I’m disappointed to say the least.

The weekend started well. We took the bus trip to the city where the race was going to be held and fortunately we managed to get a place to couch surf and even luckier the girl that was letting us stay was ALSO Going to the race. We arrived the day before because we had to go pick up our packages and so we went and took some pictures and then grabbed dinner. There were some kids on the streets selling things and asking for food and we decided to treat them to dinner (hence the four kids in the pictures).

I’m gonna put a keep reading here for the people who are squeamish about that thing that happens to people who can bear children once every month. (Or those who can’t be bothered to read about that stuff)