Week 4, Day 3

Instead of a long run today, the scheduled workout is a "progression run." I had to read the article on the web site to understand what that is. On the schedule, it is described as a "90 minute Thirds Progression Run " which means 30 minutes easy, 30 minutes moderate, 30 minutes medium to hard.

It's hot today and we slept in a little (that means, past 7 am) after staying up late watching the Olympics. So I didn't get out for the dogwalks until after 9. The lizards were out in full force by then, so I decided to walk Zen by herself. I first took Eddy & Maggie around the Observatory route, then took Zen into the woods, for a total of about 1:15.

So by the time I was ready to run, it was really too hot to run outside, so I had to do it on the treadmill. This is what I did:

1) Did the long, slow warmup from 0 to 5.7 mph (10:31 pace), until I hit 30 minutes.
2) Increased the pace every five minutes for the next 30 minutes, from 5.8 to 6.3 mph (up to 9:22 pace).
3) Increased the pace every ten minutes for the last 30 minutes, from 6.4 to 6.6 mph (up to 9:05 pace).

9:05 is faster than my current supposed marathon pace or even half-marathon pace, according to the McMillan pace calculator, but it is my actual goal marathon pace if I want that BQ, so I hope that is okay. It didn't feel too hard.

Plus, in reality I did not spend that much time at these faster paces, because I did my usual treadmill walk breaks every half-mile for one minute each time. So every four minutes or so I was walking. Yeah, I'm a wimp. If it was outside, I would walk every mile, but on the treadmill, I baby myself.

I drank water during every walk break, and I had my GU Chomps at mile 3 and 6. At the end of the 90 minutes, I hit the cooldown button on the treadmill for the five minute slow down, which went from 5.7 mph down to 3.5 mph.

Total distance was 8.34 miles in 1:35.

Eddy joined me down in the basement and I kept him occupied with a bunch of stuffed toys. To keep myself occupied, I tried to watch the Olympics. I had the TV on and also tried to watch the live feed off my phone with the earbuds in, but I am just not an earbud girl so I finally gave up on that and just watched TV. They had volleyball (of course) on NBC, and water polo on MSNBC, so I watched the water polo.

I didn't really pay attention to the game, but there is something about staring at a swimming pool that seems to really help me deal with the treadmill. I might have to get a video of just random people splashing around in a swimming pool, or just an empty swimming pool maybe, to watch.

What I didn't know was that at some point NBC started showing the heats of the men's 5000 meters, so I missed the first one but the second came on just as I was getting off the treadmill and I did get to see that one.