April Goals Report

Running 1000 miles
I ran 90.2 miles this month on 19 days. There were 11 days that I did not run. Out of those 11 days, I never took more than 2 days off at a time. I did run 4 days in a row twice this month, which is something I did not want to do. Those came on back to back weeks. I almost did it a third week in a row, but just had to tell my running partner that I could not make it because of getting too fatigued.

I am about 5 miles ahead of my goal for the year. This is my second longest running month–January was longer by 1 mile.

Reading 800 pages
I only read 644 pages this month in 5 different books. Nothing was really outstanding other than the Marathon book by Hal Higdon. Without having a goal I would not have read as much as I did. I am disappointed that I missed it again (missed in February too). But I am encouraged by the fact that I have used the goal to keep me pushing to be a more consistent reader.

OpenOffice.org help

One of my favorite blogs, OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas, has an excellent post today. Solveig has written many great tutorial posts and today’s post links to the more popular ones from the past.

Some of the posts that she links too are long and detailed, but that is the beauty of her site. She gives very clear instructions as to how to accomplish a task in OOo.

I have gotten to where I check her site first when I need help with a project. I used to go to the unofficial OOo forum first. There is a newer forum that seems to be more active these days too. And there are some good tutorial sites out there.

I subscribe to the RSS feed at OpenOffice.org Training and always like to see what she has written. Sometimes the information does not apply to what I am currently working on, but just knowing that the info is there when I need it sure comes in handy.

Running break

I took a couple of days off of running on Monday and Tuesday this week. I just felt like I was over doing the running. I was horribly tired on Sunday. I know I had just run a very strong race and Sunday is also my busiest day of the week, but that is when I always run races and the busyness never gets any easier. I was just run down.

I did not even get out of bed on Monday to call my running partner and tell him I was not going to be able to make it. I left instructions for my wife to call him as I planned to sleep in. I rested Monday and had no desire at all to run.

Tuesday I thought about doing a very easy run, but just did not feel motivated.

Today, Wednesday, I met my running partner and he started into his regular diatribe about how he feels like he is not improving. He took a few weeks off while I was away on my trip to the US and he thinks that now he is not doing as well as he was before. (We have this conversation just about every time we run). I try to convince him we are running 20 to 30 seconds per mile faster now than we were before. He refuses to believe that running slower will also mean he can run further and longer. Because Ryan Hall runs marathons at 4:45-5:00 per mile, my running friend feels like he is being lazy if he does not do 6:00 per mile himself. As much as I try to convince him that he is not going to be able to compete with Ryan Hall when he has only been running less than 6 months, he just does not hear it.

But, miracle of miracles, he decided to keep a slower pace and run with me today instead of ahead of me. We ran at a 9:18 pace instead of the 8:40 he wants to run. When we had been going at it for 29 minutes he asked me how far we had run. I told him the time and that I thought we had run about 3.2 miles. He was surprised that we had run that long and far. It is one of the longest runs we have done in the last several weeks. And we weren’t even worn out. Surprise! Running a bit slower really is helpful.

Did he learn anything? I don’t think so. He will take this experience today and probably feel guilty that we ran so slow. I say this because he then pushed the pace up to a normal speed for the next 7 minutes to finish the run.

Why don’t I just let him run at his pace and I run mine? Often I do. We start together and by the time we are done I am many blocks behind him.

We are going to run a race together in 2 weeks. It will be his first race. I am going to go for an 8:00 pace and try to kill him at the end.

Thursday is normally my long run day or speed work day. I run alone on that day. But tomorrow will be another day off for me. I still need a bit of a break.

My first cross country race

This morning I ran an 8K cross country race (5 miles). It was my first time to run a race in which we did multiple laps and my first XC.Dirty Sauconys

My poor shoes will probably never be white again.

We did 4 big laps with a final lap around a dirt track at the end. We ran around a park that is very hilly. There are two major downhills and two major uphills on each loop. Though I have run at this park before, it was never for a race, therefore the pace up the hills never mattered. On the final lap today I speed walked the two uphills. I did not seem to lose any ground on the guy just in front of me. I think it was a good strategy.

Terrain consisted of the dirt/gravel track as well as dirt roads and walking paths. Rocks were a factor for part of the race. There was a short section where we ran on grass. Each of the up/down hill sections were asphalt. About half of the paths were shaded and the other half was in full sun. Temperatures were a nice cool 73 degrees.

I ran the race in 42:36. That is a pace of 8:10 per mile. The race was 8.4 Km in length.

I got up at 5:30 this morning. That was 30 minutes before I needed to get up. I had been laying in bed awake since 5:00 and could not go back to sleep. That is what races do to me.

I was there early enough to get bib number 11 in the men’s category. There was a men’s division and a ladies’ division. First 25 places in each got a medal. There were 99 men who ran and I did not get a medal. Not sure what my placing was, but I was lapped by several of the front runners.

With getting up so early and running quite well, I had trouble staying awake in Sunday School class this morning. Oops.