Learning about pacing

Good morning! Don't forget it's daylight savings today. You should put your clock forward one hour. Hopefully we can absorb the "yuck" of that lost hour of sleep today and going in to work tomorrow won't be too bad.
Yesterday I ran the longest distance that I've ever gone. Well, "ran" is probably not the correct word - I only ran for about 57 minutes, and walked for an additional 40 minutes or so. But my total distance was over 8 miles!

This makes me feel better about taking on the crazy challenge of 10 miles on April 21st.

One thing I realized as I was doing intervals was that I really need to be careful to keep my walking intervals short or my muscles cool down and trying to run again is much more difficult.
This is the danger of layering podcasts like I did yesterday. I used the run from week 6 of Freeway to 10K from Podrunner and then added on the run from week 3 of the NHS' Couch to 5K program. By playing one immediately after the other, I ended up with nearly 10 minutes of cool down/warm up before I did a running interval on the 5k one. This was just too long. My muscles got tight and even doing just a 90 second run was unpleasant.

 This is really good to realize because as I'm doing intervals, I tend to tell myself "I can just stretch the walking interval just one more minute...." in an effort to make things a bit easier. Now I know it's actually easier if I don't extend! Anyway - here's a video from the week before. If you donate, you can see my most recent video.

Training Runs and Zombie Chases

All last year I kept running even after I'd accomplished my very first 5K and a lot of my running was done with an awesome app called "Zombies, Run!" This app was perfect for me - it made getting on the treadmill pretty easy and once the heat and humidity stopped being ridiculously oppressive, I even got out onto the street. I laughed out loud and even cried during one of the episodes. It's been my favorite app that I purchased and I highly recommend it. I'm trying to help the other runners doing the Run for Africa's Youth get into good podcasts and apps for running, so if you have any other ideas, do pass them my way. Today's post on The UNITE Foundation Facebook page highlights "Zombies, Run!" Here's my second training video for your enjoyment

The Run for Africa's Youth 2013

The Run for Africa's Youth Many of you have already heard that I will be doing the "Run for Africa's Youth" again this year, but I haven't been good about keeping you all updated through my blog, so I'm going to load up the blog a bit this week with more information about what I'm doing. I have been training since January 1st for this run and I'm still worried about my progress, but I'm getting out there every other day. As part of my Razoo fundraising site, I've been creating a new video about my running journey every week. Here's a link to my first video. It's very amateur, but I hope to improve with each new one! First week - Why am I running in the freezing rain?