Park Lake is real

Check it out, I ran 30 miles this week for the first time in a long long time!

Tuesday was a quality workout for sure. I did 6 x 1000m intervals at 10K pace. I figured I can probably easily do around 5:55-6:00/mile for a 10K, so I went at that pace. Do the math on the conversion and I came up with ~3:45 for my goal time for each interval. I ran on the river trail which is marked every quarter mile, and I figured as long as I'm between 2:55-3:00 for a half mile, then I can stop between 3:40 and 3:45. Well it so happened that I consistently hit that half mile at 2:55, and I felt strong on each of the intervals. Add in a mile warm up and cool down as well as 200m jog recoveries after each intervals, and you've got a 6.5 mile workout. Wow....there's way too many numbers in this paragraph.

Wednesday I did a short bike and swam. Thursday I did an easy 5 miles. And then came Friday....I needed to do a 6 mile tempo run @ half marathon pace, but I just couldn't figure out when I wanted to do it. I had to work from 10-5 so I could either do it before or after that. When I woke up, I decided biking was a better option, so I did 12 miles of that and worked. Of course, the sky got cloudier and darker with each passing minute and eventually by 4:30 the skies opened up.....and how! We were under a tornado warning and after all was said and done, there was some pretty good damage just south of here, like 10 minutes away. It's crazy because I can't recall the last time we've had a tornado touch down around here. It was just a short line of storms that went thru, so I ended up going for the run around 7pm on the river trail. The first mile felt great, mostly because there was some kid ahead of me who was going about the same pace, so it felt like I was sort of racing against him. Well, until he peeled off after 1.25 miles. The second mile was ok, about a couple seconds slower than the first, and then things just kinda started to fall apart. After 3 miles, I REALLY had to pee, and of course my route when 3 miles out and 3 miles back. Plus....I was pretty hungry. I had eaten lunch around 1:30 and had a little snack a couple hours later, but I poorly planned out the nutrition situation. So after relieving myself and trying to keep up my pace for the last 3 miles, my stomach was yelling at me to just quit, so I called the game at 4.75 miles and jogged in the last 1.25 miles. Add in a mile warmup to the whole thing and that gave me 7 miles.

Today I did 12 "easy" miles. Well it was like 11.7 to be exact but that's because I forgot which street to turn onto. But it was one of those grueling runs where you're tired and just wanna get it over with....then realized you've only run 4 miles. Yea. I also realized after all these years that Park Lake Road is named that way because there actually IS a Park Lake....who knew? (Apparently my whole family did.) The knee also is actually sort of barking at me a little bit, but I think that's because I did most of the route on pavement.

So that was my week. On other notes, my sister won a contest from New Balance recently....she got some free pairs of shoes and also a free entry into the Chicago Marathon. She wasn't even planning on running a marathon this year, but she's been keeping her mileage up so she's gonna do it for sure. It's gonna be her 6th marathon....how am I supposed to catch up to her if she doesn't let me catch up?? Haha. Also my coworker Steve is starting his own running blog and he's talking trash that it's gonna be better than mine. Well....yea he's probably right, haha. But we'll see who's laughing when I sell more insoles than him this month.

Run on!