ITCHING

I mentioned briefly that I’ve added some biking to my routine in the form of rides on my trainer during football games on Sundays, as well as spin classes once a week. Each of the last three Thursdays I’ve started my day at Cycle Quest. As a runner, I tend to try to exert roughly the same amount of effort throughout a race. If there’s an uphill, I’ll slow down and keep a similar effort to the flats and vice versa on a downhill. That’s great for running, but I find it puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to biking or skiing. These athletes are constantly going hard and recovery, depending on the terrain. So it a ski race situation these guys are going hard up hills, knowing they’ll be able to recover at the top, whereas my “steady as she goes” philosophy gets left in the dust. I’m hoping these spin classes will help with that.

I’ve kind of been itching to run lately, so after spin class, I hopped on the treadmill for 1 mile. I’m being overly cautious because I haven’t run in 6 weeks and I want to avoid a setback. Plus my doctor gave me some metatarsal pads to add to my inserts and I want to be careful with adding something new like that to my shoe.

By now I’m sure you’ve all added Flotrack’s Run Junkie to your favorites. If not, here’s the latest episode;

Watch more video of Run Junkie on flotrack.org

Also, the 8th episode of Ryan Sutter’s season is up on Universal Sports. In this episode he takes on a half ironman with a goal of sub-5.

Meanwhile, I didn’t even know Adam Goucher had a blog, let alone a book. Has anyone read it? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Finally, watching all the NYC Marathon coverage a couple of weeks ago has definitely moved that race up on my “must-do” list. I know it’s a hard race to get into, but they do have guaranteed entries based on half and full marathon standards. The problem is that they’ll be tightening those standards for 2013. Currently, a 40-44 year old man needs to run a 1:30 half. I don’t think that’s overly difficult - it’s about a 70 on an age-graded scale. After 2012, that time standard drops to 1:23, which is closer to 75 on an age-graded scale. Much harder, but I guess it’ll give me something to shoot for. Otherwise, there’s always the lottery route.

Quote of the Day;

“I like the high pace. You must do that tactic to kill the other people.” Sammy Wanjiru