Adarq.org

home again, arrived last night. ended up doing a lot of walking last week but only one additional run. will be interesting to see how the legs feel today! not ideal to have a cold turkey week but such is life. it was a great trip.

- run 1:16:09, 13.69 km
properly cool out for a change. tired and legs a bit dead.

ETA: also, noticed that september was my first ever 200-mile month. 322.42 km, or 200.34 miles. good stuff.

barely slept last night for some reason. not even sure whether i was awake when alarm went off but i decided to just bag it and give myself another hour in bed. weird.

yeah, DC has surprisingly quite a lot of trails in the city and nearby (the one yesterday is about a 45-minute drive from my house, closer to baltimore). great resource, although of course the grass is always greener and i fantasize about living somewhere even more trail-centric and beautiful, like colorado.

and thanks!

- run 3:05, 26.80 km
went and did the 50k race loop (race is two laps). muggy (dew point 67) and i got lost a bunch, especially at the beginning and end. slower than i thought i'd go as a result. but the course is mostly quite technical and continuously up and down, very few stretches where you can open up your stride at all. there are also two stream crossings, although i ran around the first one to a nearby bridge. the second one, no choice but to ford it. last 6-7 km run in wet shoes. overall 718m/2355' of elevation gain.

it'll be fun to run this with (1) cooler and dryer conditions, (2) aid stations, so i don't have to carry all my water and food, (3) course markings.

- run 55:24, 10.31 km, w/ 2.5 km uphill tempo in the middle
tempo splits 4:29, 4:20, 4:13. super humid and i'd run out of clean shorts so i had to wear tights 

- track workout
-- warm up
-- 7 x [4 min @ 8k pace, 2 min jogging rest]
-- cool down
successfully didn't overrun this, 4:01-4:06 pace for all reps.

- half marathon
-- warm up
-- race in 1:34:10 (gun), 1:34:06 (chip), 1:34:00 (watch)
-- cool down
it became obvious about halfway through that i wasn't going to PR, so i ran hard (but a bit above 1:30 pace) until the 10 mile mark and then basically shut it down to a fast jog. even if i'd had an even split for the final third, still would have been like a 1:31:xx. it's pretty humid today (dew point 63), but mostly my legs were just not rested. delusionally, i thought i was maybe in so much better shape than the spring that it wouldn't matter. lol. shouldn't be disappointed, i set out for this to basically be an extra hard workout and so it was, but it didn't feel great to not feel great. live and learn.

couple later reflections: the course was net downhill but not at all flat. lots of little steep climbs and especially steep descents, which toward the end of the race were no fun at all. probably good training, though. calves are having a little bit of the post-hard-effort twitchies but nothing too intense. i took a naratriptan as soon as i got back to my car, and while i have a mild headache this afternoon i seem to have avoided my typical full-blown migraine.