Stretched the long run a little more to 25K (15.6M) today. Samantha and Lia, you would be proud of me that instead of running and walking, I ran the whole distance today. As a result, I am three toenails short of full count 🙂

Went for a quick 5K run before office calls started. Delighted by mid fifties temperature, the sun hidden by a cloud cover and relatively flat roads and dry conditions, I picked up my speed a bit.

In under fifteen minutes, I was reminded of how our geography teacher in eighth grade Mrs. Bhowmic had painstakingly explained why oxygen level and height from mean sea level are negatively correlated for a given location 🙂

I am wiped out!

Tried the same interval running that I tried in the 13 mile run beginning of the month. The difference between the two runs is best described in four simple charts 🙂

After a long long time, completed 100K in half a month this morning…

The familiar faces showed up. I put in a slow 5K recovery run together with Sharmila.

Thanks to my good old friend Mary Banks, I tried a new way of running today. No, this is not about how to run and get a visit from the ambulance. It is actually about running and walking. She suggested that I try out 3 minute run and 1 minute walk all throughout the run. She also suggested that I would be surprised by the average pace.

Which is exactly what happened. If you look at the graph (blue line) you can see the 3 minute runs (the troughs) and the 1 minute walks (the peaks). I would have guessed that I would average out around 12 minute mile given the heat and direct sunlight. Instead, it came to a pretty quick (for me) 10 min 15 seconds.

Couple of things I noticed – my runs were faster than expected since I was catching up with my breath during walks. And the walks had become faster than I would expect because I was already energized by the run. Finally, the muscles felt much better at the end since the wear and tear was distributed because of varying of the speed.

You will notice in the red line (time) that there were three temporary stops (vertical segments). The first one near 4 mile marker was a water break. The third one right after the 10 mile marker was waiting to cross a road. The second one around the 7 mile marker? That was to give the right of the way to a three feet King snake crossing the trail!!!