Dogs Gone Wild

I am definitely sticking with the Pfitzinger program until the end. How else to tell if it works? The long runs, over and over, are just very time consuming to a slow runner like myself. I look at my messy house and think of what I could be doing if I wasn't spending endless hours running. But, oh well.

After cleaning the teenage boys bathroom -- which hadn't been properly cleaned since January (gross!) -- I hit the treadmill for 8 miles with 6x600 at 10k pace for my LT run. Maybe it should have been 5k pace, but I don't think I could have finished at that pace.

First 4.5 miles were at marathon pace: 9:55, 9:57, 9:59, 9:58, 5:11 for the .5. Funny that, with the exception of the .5 which was slower, these were on the treadmill set at 6.0. Hmm...

Then the intervals (90 sec. jog in between): HR between 169-171.

Appropos of the dog discussion on Hal Higdon earlier today, I let my dogs outside in between the 2nd and 3rd interval. Guess what? They escaped. Both of them. 2:30 I get a phone call: "I have Kimo and Olympia." They stuck together, fortunately, and wound up about a mile away but through the woods. It was about a 10 minute drive for me! Thank goodness a dog owner had the good sense to check for tags and hold onto them while he called me. I can't tell you the number of times I've called dog owners from the dog's tags, but it's unusual that someone does this. Definitely only a dog owner would understand how devasted we would be to lose our dogs.
Anyway, Kimo and Olympia are home safe, sound, and very dirty. Especially Kimo, the white Eskie. They are locked up in their kennels for the time being until I can shower them.

I hope they didn't terrorize any runners while they were on their adventure.

December 3, 1979

If you are about my age (45) or older, you no doubt remember the tragedy at the Who concert in Cincinnati on December 3, 1979. Scott has been going through Jolie's storage unit and yesterday he brought home a couple of old issues of Rolling Stone. One was this one, which was pretty exciting. It's probably the most famous of Rolling Stone covers with the photo by Annie Liebowitz.

But the one that really sent me back to high school was this one:

You see, three of those eleven kids went to my high school, a small suburban high school, in Cincinnati. I knew two of the three -- Stephen Preston and Jackie Eckerle. It turns out that Jolie, my sister in law, had gone to the concert and not had any idea of the horrific events that occured outside the Colliseum. She must have been obsessed with it for awhile, because she had saved this issue of Rolling Stone and cut some things out of the magazine which probably hung on the walls of her bedroom for a time.

Yesterday, when I saw the issue for the first time in my life, I couldn't believe that I was looking at the photographs of kids I knew in high school on the cover of Rolling Stone, a magazine I regularly read now as an adult, but never read as a kid. When I opened the magazine, I couldn't believe that I was looking at a roomful of mournful teenagers that I recognized and remembered! in Steve Preston's parent's living room. Talk about weird!

Things were so weirdly different in 1979. I went to a small school. Eleven local people were crushed at a concert. Three were from my high school, and yet, I remember that it was business as usual at school. There were no grief counselors. There were no school assemblies or memorials. The hallways were eerily quiet for one day and then back to normal right away. Did the school administrators and other adults in our lives think that it was better to ignore something this tragic than to deal with it? Did I grow up in a time when grownups were afraid to talk about the deaths of young people and somehow felt that only a certain kind of person would go to a rock concert? I wonder then, how my own parents felt when I went to the Van Halen concert the following year, which was the first rock concert at Riverfront Colliseum following the Who.

Anyway, after all these years, I still occasionally think about Jackie, Steve, and Karen (who I did not know), and I think about the human reactions to the tragedy and my own perceptions of that time 29 years ago.
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I ran about 9.5 miles today of my scheduled 17. My legs felt like bricks. Maybe because of the 5k I raced yesterday then the 3 I ran on top of it. Anyway, I really hate the Pfitz program. It's too time consuming and I dread all of the runs. It's just not fun anymore.

WTD: 33

YTD: 422

Emerald Miles 5k

Today was my first race of the year. A 5k called Emerald Miles which benefits the Epilepsy Foundation of Cincinnati. Now in its eighth year, it attracts a fairly large crowd for a mid-March 5k -- especially considering that we had a foot of snow on the ground last Saturday. I woke up to heavy fog, but no rain. The temperature was about 38 degrees and really perfect for a race. My performance? Well, not a PR, but not terrible either. I guess every race can't be a PR! One fun part of the race was running across the Purple People Bridge which is a pedestrian only bridge that spans the Ohio River. I've never been on it before today, and it is too narrow to accomodate any of the big Cincy races. This race started in Newport, Ky right at the bridge entrance, crossed the river and ran through a riverfront park before heading back into Newport.

I finished in a respectable 26:10. Splits were 8:05, 8:25, 8:36, 7:25 for the last .14. My heartrate at the finish was 175 which is lower than it was last summer at the end of a 5k (189). I've done nothing but eat since finishing the race. Now I think I'll go run 3 more miles.

Blog, I am neglecting you

I have a 5k on Saturday, so I was kinda excited to do today's VO2 Max run of 8 miles w/ 5x600 at 5k pace. I mapped out an old course on mapmyrun that would end up at the track. Fleet Feet is about 1/4 mile from the track and I needed some more gels, hence my motivation to get away from home and my usual route. Because I couldn't decide whether to park my car at Fleet Feet and start the run from there or park at the school and run a little more, I ended up running a full 7 miles before I even made it to the track. I parked at the school thinking I wouldn't feel like running anymore after the track workout, but Fleet Feet ended up being farther from the school than I thought. (I mapped the run starting from Fleet Feet). I ran the 7 at marathon pace which didn't give me the freshest of legs for the 600s, but hey, if I can run 7 at mp then 5x600 at about 9:30 avg., I must be making some inroads, right?

The track was pretty clear of snow. Not so the sidewalks. Sometimes I imagined I was Mardi climbing over piles of dirty, slushy, plowed snow. Only I was the slow version. ;)

I'm trying to think of a route where I can warmup with 3 miles ending at the track, then I could do the 3 miles again to finish up. That way, at least I stand a fighting chance of hitting a 5k pace of 8:30 or under on the 600s. My last 5k was June 16 with a finish of 25:59. That's faster than McMillan predicts based on my best 10k, 1/2 and marathon times. Of course, I'll try to beat it!

Thriller

. . . Not the run, it was uneventful. But the music! I bought Thriller 25 the 25th anniversary edition of Michael Jackson's Thriller (yes, I bought the CD because I am 45 and that's what I do. I like to have a hard copy). I listened to it on my ipod during today's run. It's such a great album. It brings back great memories, but all the songs stand on their own and are just as great today as they were in 1983 when I would dance to them at the AEPi parties at Indiana University.

My run was 8 miles. I ran outside by the Ohio River while Sarah was at dance rehearsal. Nice and flat. Out four and back four. I reset the Garmin at the turn around to do 8x100 strides for the last two miles with two minutes in between each stride. That stretched it out! Two minutes is an eternity when you don't feel like you need that much time, but as a result, my strides didn't slow down and even got faster. My average pace for the whole 8 miles was about 10:00/m. The strides were in the 8s with one at 7:57 (yeah me!).

Alright, so a faster person might have listened to the entire album and been done with the run, but I had to add on two versions of Smooth Criminal (Alien Ant Farm and Michael Jackson) plus a couple of other songs.

In all, it was a nice run and a good effort.

Tomorrow: 14

MTD (February): 154 (One extra day didn't help my totals at all).