Oops… found some hills
I’m mixing up my training schedule for the next few days. I was going to do my one long run of the week today (which actually wasn’t scheduled for today), but Elizabeth convinced me to do my long run with her tomorrow. So, today I decided to do a short, easy run. I left the house and was going to head towards Balboa Park, a course that I remembered being relatively flat. The beginning of the run was mostly flat, but then I took a turn somwhere and found hills. A nice long downhill, complemented by a long, long, steep uphill. Thus, keeping the run within zone 1 wasn’t realistic. In fact, I normally can’t keep my flat runs in zone 1 or even 2. I have a hard time keeping it slow. In addition to the I’m not sure exactly what the benefit of a zone 1 run is. I know that I’m supposed to be building base miles and during this phase, I can be doing low effort, long sessions. I emailed John the other day and am curious to learn more. I’m hoping that if I know and understand what its for, I’ll make a better effort at doing it. Anyway, back to today: as boring as it sounds, it was another good run; nothing too exciting or special, though it was nice to run in shorts and t-shirt in December and it was obviously nice to run something different than the West Side Highway. I started off struggling just a bit, but once I warmed-up, I felt good. This probably explains why I didn’t run even one step in zone 1.
I’ve been thinking a lot this trip about picking a charity to raise money for. I would like to start raising money soon after the first of the year. I’ve also started telling a few people about the blog. The other week I told a couple friends and I told Loren and Aaron about it this week. I haven’t sent the url to anyone, but I’ll start doing that soon too. Now that I know that I am going to keep up with the writing and the training, I’m going to start letting people read it. Also, I’ve been playing around online and have found some other people’s training blogs. I’m beginning to think that it might be fun to make the blog public. I don’t know if anyone will actually read it… In connection with the fundraising that I’m going to do, passing along the blog will be a nice addition.
Took another good one of Charlie today. Thank goodness I don’t think this dog is cute or anything!
Run – December 28
Time: 31:42
Distance: 3.5 miles
Average heart rate: 142
Course: Mission Hills, San Diego
Conditions: Awesome night, high 50’s, clear