Stitches

Today at lunch I hit the treadmill for another half hour run. I increased the pace to 7:13/mile which felt pretty comfortable, except for the fact I got a bit of a side stitch 25 minutes into the workout. It was nothing major, it just struck me as odd because I had not eaten anything for several hours. Boring blog post I know, but I had a few minutes on the way back from home and figured why not. It's freezing outside now, but this ferry bus is almost too warm. Now this post is getting truly random...

Textbook Training Week

Last week for various and sundry reasons (the primary one being sheer laziness) I only ran twice and did not lift weights at all. This week I vowed to be more disciplined, and managed to get three runs and two weightlifting sessions in. Two of the runs were at 7:18/mile pace, and today I dialed it back to 7:30 because I was running for the second day in a row (and the earlier runs were not as comfortable as I would have liked). I have become remarkably good at just blasting through half an hour treadmill runs without constantly staring at the elapsed time (which inevitably makes the workout go by much slower) -- just give me my ESPN and my headphones and I am set.

I have not been eating all that well the last couple of weeks, so I was not surprised to see I am back up to 183ish lbs. Not the end of the world, but my battle against sugar is clearly still ongoing. Nevertheless, I feel great about the fact I am already running in the low 7:xx/mile range and it is not even January yet! It will be kind of tough getting quality workouts in over the next couple of weeks with the holidays, but to I am just thrilled to have this type of base at this time of the year...

Thanksgiving Weekend Treat

O.K., as I mentioned two posts ago, I was not expecting to get any workouts in over Thanksgiving weekend, as my in-laws were in town. It turns out I was mistaken -- my brother in-law is kind of a serious runner, and wanted to get a couple of runs in around Hoboken. Needless to say, I was psyched! We did a little more than four mile run on Friday, followed by a pretty hard five miler on Saturday. The weather was brisk but bearable both days, which was nice. The Saturday run was at sub-7:30/mile pace, which is really fast for me with less than one months of training under my belt. I definitely had to slow down the last mile so that my brother in-law could keep up with me, which was a good feeling considering the pace of the first four miles. Combined with the two four mile treadmill runs that I did earlier in the week, I ran 17 miles last week, which is definitely a November record for me (excluding last year, in which I ran the NYC Marathon the first Sunday of November).

Given the strong weekend runs, I decided to skip my scheduled week of running at 7:36/mile pace and go directly to 7:30. My run today felt O.K., but not as easy as my previous ones, which makes me think I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I'll see how my other runs go this week and then decide what to do next week. Oh, and I'm down to 182 lbs. I also decided to forgo my usual lunchtime cookie for a bag of Sun Chips, which should help. I just need to stay away from that sugar...