Last Minute (for me) Racing Decision

I got some good runs in last week, although I moved some workouts around due to laziness and overall exhaustion from work, but I feel OK with getting three runs in and not four. This week's plan got a bit adjusted last minute, but should come out to four runs, hopefully.

Initially, I had decided to make the Baltimore Running Festival 5K on 10/10 my first race since starting up with running again. However, I had seen advertisements for a race called Freedom's Run, being held just about 15 minutes from my parents' house in West Virginia. It sounded like an awesome race and they are offering a full, half, 10K and 5K. I had hoped to be ready to run a 10K by October, but am pleased that I have adhered to my main goal of taking it slow and adding distance very gradually. I think that has helped me a lot, and I'm about 30-45 seconds faster on all my runs this year than I was last year, which is great.

Anyway, Freedom's Run is being held this upcoming weekend, but I didn't think that I'd be able to do it, which bummed me out since I've yet to run a race in my home state. Plus, you get some serious swag for the race: a technical t-shirt, a water bottle with hand strap, free stuff sack, and a beer mug (for 21+ runners, of course.) Pretty nice for a $25 5K entry fee, right?

As fate would have it, we had a free weekend this weekend (no friends visiting or auditions in NY or mountains of work, etc) so we decided it'd be a nice weekend to head up to WV to see my parents since we are going to be in Cincinnati for Thanksgiving this year. So, Annie and I will get to run the 5K after all, which is awesome.

So, I'll get to test out my training to date on Saturday. Based on the elevation profile of the course, it should be somewhat fast, although the hill at the end is going to be murder. But by then, I'm hoping I'll just not care and will run through the pain.

Tonight, in between watching the first installment (TiVoed, of course) of Ken Burns' documentary on the national parks and reading some investment research for a new company I'm covering, I'll think about a race strategy and decide just how hard I want to run this race. Do I want to aim for a PR, considering how flat much of the course is? Do I want to just run it kinda hard and save up for Baltimore in two weeks? Do I want to treat it like a training run and just enjoy it so I can do a longer run on Sunday?

My initial reaction is that I want to run it hard and try to PR on it because the Baltimore 5K is much hillier. So if that's my overall attack, what is my underlying strategy? So many questions, but nonetheless, I'm excited to be running a race this weekend!

New Office, New Attempt at Mid-Day Running?

I had originally intended to post about my firm moving offices at the end of today from our current location in downtown Baltimore to a new high rise in Harbor East. But then I realized that unless you live here, none of that makes any difference. The move only matters for this blog in that it might change how and when I run once winter rolls in later in the year.

Last winter I temporarily moved my running from the early morning to the middle of the day as an experiment to see if that worked better for my schedule. It was OK, but not really much easier than getting up early and braving the cold elements. Part of the reason for that is that running from downtown Baltimore to any of the neighboring areas is a challenge. You're dodging not just traffic, but tourists and pedestrians and the generally unpleasant people who aren't awake yet at 6 AM when I normally run. The traffic signals are also longer downtown, making the run very segmented. All in all, a disappointing experience.

Harbor East (see map below) is much more pedestrian friendly and is not all that far from Canton and Patterson Park, so that's much better than dealing with the Inner Harbor. Once winter really rolls in and running in the cold pre-dawn darkness gets old, I may try mid-day running again and see how it goes. Of course, there is always the challenge of finding an hour in the middle of my day to get out of the office.


View Larger Map

The Motor City: Where Public Transit Is Against the Law

Back from our weekend wedding adventure to Detroit and I am ever so happy to be back on the East Coast. Don't get me wrong; I'm not an Eastern snob who thinks that the vast expanse of the country between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts is full of hicks and Red state idiots. Not at all, as my wife and her family are from Cincinnati and I have always enjoyed my visits to the middle of the country.

However, I like the tenor of life here in the East and prefer it to the Midwest. And while I only saw a small sliver of the Detroit metro area (I would have liked to have seen downtown Detroit, for example), I can safely say that I like living in a city here I can walk everywhere I need to go or that I can take trains further afield. If you don't on a car in Detroit, you are literally stranded. Everywhere we needed to go this weekend was 30-40 minutes away, which is really FAR for a city dweller such as me. I'm already mad that my walking commute to the office each day will grow by about 10 minutes when e move to our new tower next week.

I did get a run in over the weekend, though. I did a brief 3.5 mile run from our hotel through a neighborhood nearby and ended at a local Starbucks for a 0.5 mile cool down walk back to the hotel. The weather was fantastic for both the wedding and the run: sunny, low humidity and in the mid 70's in the day, high 50's in the mornings.

The run was good and I only needed to stop once to figure out which way I wanted to run. I basically stuck to my MapMyRun.com route and only overshot by a tenth of a mile, finishing at 3.6 miles. Not bad. It was relatively early in the morning (8:00 AM) so car and foot traffic was light and I only saw one other runner. On a Sunday morning in Baltimore, I'll usually see scores of people (mostly down around the Harbor) running or walking but it could have just been I was in a neighborhood that lacked runners. I did run past several vocal dogs ho were not happy to see a runner encroaching on their yards though.

I had meant to get up today and run but I've been dragging all day and ran out of time. So, I'll get up tomorrow and get a few miles under my weekly belt. Unfortunately, it's back to the grind tomorrow and I won't have another holiday break until Thanksgiving since the market's next holiday is Thanksgiving. This is probably the longest drought period for a holiday, sadly.

Thinking On The Run

I've noticed recently that my posts tend to be shapeless in their subject matter. That is, I tend to not have a plan for what I want to post about and end up blathering on and boring even myself. So, I'm going to make a concerted effort to post only when I have something worth writing about and to try some structured posts. By structured, I mean posts with specific topics in mind.

My first stab at this will be a series called "Thinking On the Run" mainly because I didn't want to spend 20 minutes trying to think of a more clever title. I occasionally have interesting (well, I consider them interesting at least) thoughts or small soliloquies with myself about a particular topic. Even though I didn't run this morning, this post is running-inspired, and that's close enough for a first try.

I was walking to work, as I do most mornings when it isn't pouring down rain or so bitter cold it's painful. With the recent spate of fall-like weather, I've seen more people out running in the mornings, although I've yet to see many runners out at 6 AM yet. THey're usually out around 7:30 when I head to the office. Anyway, today was no different. I was walking and saw a young woman running towards me on my side of the street. She passed me by but a few seconds later I heard a guy who must have been across the street behind me call out to her saying something like, "Hey, you enjoyin' yo run, sweetie?" or something like that. I presume she kept on running or maybe didn't even hear him if she was listening to music.

Nonetheless, cat calling women seems to be a past time of lots of guys in Baltimore and with women who are running, it always seems even more foolish/desperate. I'm never sure if those guys think women will stop and talk to them or what...maybe they do, maybe they just want a reaction out of her. I've yet to experience any female runner respond to a cat call, though. It just seems like a complete waste of time because what woman in her right mind would hear a strange guy call after her, stop her workout, turn around, and end up striking up a conversation with him? In Baltimore, no less, where we've had somewhere around 200 homicides this year thus far.

There's also no consideration for how it makes someone feel to know that whenever they go out for a run in their neighborhood they'll likely be accosted at least once. But in Baltimore, it's expected, unfortunately.

I put cat calling a female runner up there with taxi drivers honking their horns at attractive women as they drive by as two of the most non-sensical things that I see routinely in Baltimore. There are others like walking out into traffic no matter what's coming at you (literally daring the cars to hit you), traffic cops refusing to penalize drivers blocking intersections while getting angry at pedestrians crossing at proper times, and taxi drivers who ask you for directions when you get in the cab.

On another note, I found out today that my company will again be sponsoring the Baltimore Running Festival and that I managed to score a sponsor's registration for the 5K. So, I'll get to run the race for free and participate in the festival for the third year in a row. Sweet! In a recession, saving that $45 registration fee is key.