Saturday, February 14, 2009

zigging and zagging around

Bird's eye or should I say satellite's eye view of today's run. It was another cold and windy day
with temps around -8C and windchill of -15C/3F with wind of 15-25 mph but it didn't seem as bad today for some reason. I wasn't really overdressed, just comfortable in 2 layers of shirts plus my Gore-tex jacket with a lifesaving hood for the crazy wind.

The run started out as an errand run with a stop to drop off a book at the library and then another stop to check the mail at the post office (see the big dips in my heartrate when stopped) but the conditions made me change my mind about running out of town on the open highway. Doing a zig-zag or back and forth pattern like this works really well on the very cold days when the wind is screaming out of the northwest. It gets the wind at your back for at least part of the run and the streets in town are reasonably clear of ice and snow. It's also nice that each leg is about 1 mile in one direction and I could slowly count down the miles and blocks. My pace was all over the place with the downwind legs around 8:15 and the upwind trudges at close to 9:00 while the heartrate stayed fairly constant (without monitoring) around 80% of max. A good 10 miler in 1:27.

That's almost it for this week. I've also zigged and zagged the workouts getting them all in according to Pfitz (but not in the same order). Did a 5 mile treadmill easy run on Friday and tomorrow's long run of 17 with Andrew will put me at 43 miles for the week. Still on track!

That's it, have a great weekend!

2 comments:

Thomas said...

Looks like your training is clicking into gear just in time. The weather conditions are bound to improve sooner rather than later.

Ewen said...

Mike, I think we hit -8C once in the depths of last winter. I'd prefer to do a 10-miler like that than on the treadmill. Pretty good pace all things considered.