And I was going to say here that my upper legs were killing me, but
stretching seems to have cured that.
I ran the Shamrock 'n Half Marathon this morning, and it was awesome. I had lots of fun (and passing the 2:00 pace runner was the best feeling in the world, really. ;). The official results have been posted, and I finished in 1:46:47.4, which is a 8:09 minute mile. Even crazier than that, out of the 3603 people running the race, I came in 514th! Anyways, I'm generally psyched about the results. I still don't think I'll be running a full Marathon any time soon, but I definitely want to see how fast I can do a 10k and a 5k at this point.
When I left the house this morning, the sun was just creeping over the
hills. It rained last night, and was mostly cloudy, but the sun managed
to find plenty of holes in the clouds to peek through. The morning
after a rain is always the most beautiful, with the vibrant colors and
the fresh, clean air. I was already quite happy with the morning when
the rain started again. As I looked around, I noticed a huge rainbow on
my left. It was the full arc. Continuing on my way home, I found that I
was running straight towards the rainbow, and was hoping that it would
stay around so I could show Mara and Emma when I got home. Sadly, this
was not to be. When I got near the end of the trail, the rainbow
started to disappear, and was gone completely when I finished my run.
On my walk home, I could come to only one conclusion: I must live at
the end of the rainbow.
I ran a little more than a half marathon today in preparation for the half marathon that I'm going to be running in Sacramento in two weeks. I'm getting a lot better at this a lot faster than I would have expected. I did 13.92 miles in 2:01:04, which is a 8:42 minute/mile average. That's crazy, since this was a somewhat relaxed training run, and I ran something like a 8:50 on one of the first races that I did. Of course, I have a map.
I went for my run this morning, and discovered that they had closed part of the trail I run on. So, I created a detour, and got a little carried away. (The plan was for a 6-7 mile run, that ended up being almost 10 miles.) I did learn that running on Treat Blvd sucks, running on Oak Grove Rd is only a little better, and running on Ygnacio Valley Blvd east of Heather Farm is actually quite nice.
I decided to give up on doing it the hard way, and I found a website that would generate the map for me. So here's the GPS data mapped on a Google Map. Previously.
In my opinion, running in the rain is one of life's great joys. While I'm not sure I would have wanted to do the 16 miler in the rain, the 7 miles I did this morning was just about right. I haven't had the chance to run in real rain like this in at least a year. This has turned out to be a good running weekend.
I ran 16.5 miles yesterday, in 2:36:18, which is a 9:31 minute/mile average. I've been putting off this post because I wanted to post a map with my actual run data on it, but with the tools I have, that's proving to be a bit more work than I expected. Anyways, here's the route I plotted beforehand. In the process of running that distance, I've proved to myself that I can do a half marathon (13.1 miles), no problem. However, I'm definitely not doing a marathon any time soon, as the last 3 miles ended up being an exercise in perseverance. The first 10 miles of the run on the Iron Horse Trail were absolutely the best. There are some really beautiful stretches of trail through Alamo. For those of you not on the crazy runner kick, it would be a really nice bike ride (and it's pretty much all flat.) Anyways, when I get my GPS line nicely overlaid on a Google Map, I'll
post it here.
post it here.
I'm going to be running it. They promise a flat course, and that
they'll keep the finish open for 4 hours, which means that it would be
possible to walk it. So... anyone
want to join me? I think it'll be a lot of fun.