On To The Next One

On Tuesday night when we got home from Seattle, I was greeted at the door with a home baked Birthday Cake from my mother-in-law. Even though it was 11:00 p.m. I had to have a slice. It's official, as of July 11th, I'm 45 and in a new age bracket for Boston Qualifying! 3:30. I'm going to try not to think about it too much.

I had already worked out a schedule for the St. George Maraton in October before I'd even run SEAFAIR. My goal was to finally hit 50 miles at least a couple of times before then and to get in as many 20+ milers as possible. I also wanted to give myself a couple of easier recovery weeks before getting into the new cycle. I typically take a complete week off after a marathon, running 6 to 8 the Saturday after. Im using a schedule from the NYC Marathon website as a guideline. It is described as "Competitive Marathoner...a schedule for a veteran marathoner aiming to improve race time (from a 30-mile-per-week base for a least one month to a peak of 50 miles per week)." I can accept the veteran label, but I'm going to have to work on embracing the competitive marathoner label.

I decided to ease back into it with an easy 4 miles on Thursday evening. It was HOT when I got home from work, so the kids and I ate dinner quickly and I planned to go out about 8:00 p.m. when it would have cooled down somewhat. My wife was at her water aerobics class. After dinner I fell asleep in the chair working on the crossword puzzle. I woke up after 8:00 when my wife got home. I was beat. There was no running going to happen that night.

Friday morning I woke at the first alarm and made a made dash out the door to get in the 4 miles before work. My wife thought I was certifiably insane. I went over to the Via Verde horse trail. I hadn't run over there since March before my training for SEAFAIR began in earnest. I cut the run to 3 but it felt great. I still had time to shower and made it to work only a couple of minutes late.


I met the CA Cruisers, including Kitty, in Valencia for a run we call Tricia's Run. The last time I had run there was with Dr. John. He and I were paired up again. I should have known better. I had planned on 8 miles. As before, I figured the run with Dr. John would control my pace and be good for recovering from the marathon. John was planning 10. No problem I thought, 2 more miles won't kill me. We were just rolling along at a fairly relaxed pace down the horse trail in Yorba Linda. I wasn't paying much attention to my watch and I had no real idea how far we'd gone since we don't run here often. John runs with a Garmin. When I finally asked him how far we'd gone we were just short of 6 miles. OOPS! John was still determined to find the link in the trails that we hadn't found back in November. I figured we were close, so I told John we'd just keep going and find the end once and for all. Luckily we were only about 0.5 mile away. By the time we got back to the cars we'd covered 13 miles. Just a little beyond my plan (note the sarcasm), but when you run with Dr. John you never know what you're going to get. At least the pace was easy at 2 hours 25 minutes.

This picture is at one of the places the trail crosses a street, we didn't run much asphalt at all.

Sunday morning I went over to Bonelli and ran the road over the dam and the Puddingstone Dr. Trail for 5 miles, no hilly trail this week. My pace was 10:17. Between the heat and the marathon recovery, I'm guessing the slower pace is OK for now.

Miles for the week: 21

In other news, I got a phone call from Janice this morning. She completed her second half marathon today, the Carneros Wine Country Half, in 2:02:10. A PR for her on a gently rolling course, woohoo. She improved by 3 minutes from Fontana which is all downhill. Now I've just got to get her to start a running blog!