Friday, July 24, 2009

Onward and upward !

The holidays are still rolling along as well as the running. My latest adventure puts me in PEI for a few days as we visit my daughter Stephanie. She lives close to the Confederation Trail which winds from one end of the Island to the other and is one of my favorite running places. No matter the weather, from good sunny conditions to rain or even cold winter with snow and wind I always enjoy my runs here.

The running is going reasonably well as I try to follow "The Plan" that I've put in front of myself to build for a fall marathon. I'm still working my way back to the old normal, slowly increasing the distances for all my runs and working at reducing the walking breaks as well.
This past Sunday I got together with Andrew for a Boyden run, which was the 1st one we've had since way back in April. We did 13.5 miles which was the longest since my operation but I needed short walk breaks every 10 minutes to allow me to go the distance. My endurance just isn't there yet but it will come. The breaks were only about 1 minute long to let my heartrate get down to about 130 or 70% of max and really seemed to throw poor Andrew off his game. Hopefully, we'll get back to continuous runs before too long. I'll be aiming for 15 minutes running this weekend for our long run.

Here on PEI I took a timeout today for a pose during today's birthday run of 4 miles. I'm 54 years young and will be celebrating with a nice family supper here in Charlottetown tonite. I'm also looking forward to running in a 5k race on Saturday morning. It'll just be another fun run for me as I'm a long ways from being ready to race yet. Since it's a nice flat race in the downtown core my chances of improving on the previous race time should be good but again, I'm 'not' racing!

Have a nice weekend!

15 comments:

bricey said...

happy birthday

A. Power said...

Happy Birthday, and good luck in the race tomorrow!

Michael said...

Happy Birthday! Glad to see that you're recovering well, and all the best down the road!

Andrew said...

Happy birthday! See you on Sunday!

Trevor said...

Happy birthday Mike! It's Barry Bonds' birthday too - I'll have to search for his running blog and send him a similar greeting!

Your running seems to be progressing nicely.

Thomas said...

Happy Birthday Mike!

You're not starting from 0, and your endurance will come back soon enough. As long as you're enjoying your runs, you're doing great,

Ewen said...

Happy belated bidet! Even if 'not racing', I'm expecting an improvement - I'll take a guess at 23:54.

Love the look of that trail - why wouldn't one run?

Grellan said...

Your recovery is remarkable. 13.5 miles is longer than my longest run since Cork (12.1 miles this morning). Happy Bitthday and I trust your first M54 race went well.

Love2Run said...

Hey, thanks for all the well wishes.

Ewen, would you believe 24:00 flat and I resisted the urge to respond to being passed in the last 100m?

Love2Run said...

Ooops, I got a 23:57 according to the PEI website results. That's even closer E!

http://www.peiroadrunners.ca/PEIROADRUNNERHOME.html

Ewen said...

Yes, I can believe it. Anybody who runs in temps lower than -15C while putting up with Andrew's jokes shows great discipline.

Now if you'd gone with that bloke you would have run 23:54!

Unknown said...

Happy belated birthday! Best of luck with your comeback.

Michael said...

Happy Birthday (sorry I'm late). PEI looks to be a great place, Ally and I will have to see if we can get out there soon... perhaps I'll see if I can do the marathon.

MB said...

You go Mike!

DawnB said...

Happy belated birthday. I just saw your log 17 miles today can't wait to hear about it.