First 1000 Miles, Mountain Biking, and Running

The First 1000 Miles

Sometime last week I completed the first 1000-miles for the year. My goal for the year is 2500 kilometers, which is about 1550 miles – I guess I’ll be able to achieve that without too much trouble, but what will I do the rest of the year ;-)

Mountain Biking on my “Mountain”

On Sunday afternoon my wife wanted to study (Technical English), so I decided to measure my hilly running route in Weingarten. At first I thought about biking the 12K/7.5M to Weingarten and then measure my hilly trail (and then ride the 12K home). But a lot of my running route involved some serious hill climbs (for a bike at least) and my quads were still feeling the 10K race from the day before, so I wimped out and loaded the bike in my car and drove to Weingarten. This turned out to be a good decision because by the time I hit the first uphill my quads informed me that they were not interested in climbing any hills and I ended up pushing my bike. Now, being a “hobby biker” I have no problem with this. In any case, the downhill portions were scary and reminded me that I should do some maintenance on my brakes and maybe buy a bike helmet.

So the results of my trail measuring experience was that my loop is not 11K/6.8M, like I had guesstimated, but rather 11.5K/7.1M. This means that my long run pace has been around 6:30/K (10:30/M) instead of the 6:50/K (11:00/M) that I thought I had been averaging. When I consider the hills involved and the fact that in most cases I took at least two 3-minute walk breaks with each loop, this is not bad.

An Early Morning Tempo Run

Today (Monday) I have to stay a little later so that I can communicate with an engineer in our USA company, so I decided to do my run before work. I was out the door at 5:15 a.m. and quickly settled into a 5:30/K (8:51/M) pace. The air was still cool (22C/72F) and fresh from the rain the had fallen through the night, and the sun was just starting to peek out on the horizon. The first half went rather uneventful, but then I could feel the workout from the weekend. I fought the urge to slow down and continued around my loop, completing the first 10K in 55:05, right on pace. I had to continue to fight the urge to slack off as I wound my way over the last field ways back to my house. I ended up with an average pace of 5:29/K (8:49/M) for the 14K/8.7M, a good tempo run, despite trying to break my 10K record on Saturday night.

Tomorrow night I want to stop at the pool for some laps and on Wednesday I plan on running with the Graben Running Club again. On Saturday morning I want to try a 3¼ to 3½ hour long run. If this goes well I may run a training half-marathon on July 22 or a training marathon on July 23. I define a “training” event as one where I run at long run pace and take regular walk breaks. The other requirement is that the race shouldn’t throw off my training schedule more than a couple days. I just thought I would throw that out here ;-)