Man, getting old sucks sometimes. The year started with the first of many dental procedures I need in 2020 and the month ending with two teeth pulled. In between, I decided to finally go to the gym to do some upper body strengthing work and managed to strain my right arm. I had four days where I couldn’t really straighten my arm. Then, my hip on the left side started acting up. That’s still bothering me a bit but I can work through it. Honestly, I think part of the hip issue is because I’ve sat on my butt so much lately. Only seven runs logged in for the month.
35.05 Miles in January
60.41 Miles in December
No more dental procedures for another six weeks anyway so the month of February should be better. I have a 10K scheduled as well. The course will be fairly flat and I don’t get those too often so I’m hoping to improve on my time a bit.
I live in a “planned community” and we have a local magazine for our neighborhood. Really, it’s a vehicle for selling advertisements but each month they feature a family living here. February is heart awareness month and they interviewed my wife and I for the February issue.
Initially, I was a bit reluctant to be interviewed. I didn’t think my story would interest many people for one and the section of my community is mostly older folks. Many of them are much older than me and they’ve had their fair share of heart ailments too. After thinking about it for a few days I agreed. The story turned out pretty well and has been well received. I’ve had quite a few calls, text messages and e-mails about it. So now, I’m glad I did it.
The image above is really a PDF file with the entire article. You can click on the image and then download it to read it.
Not much else to say about January. I knew my mileage would take a hit because of the dental work but I wasn’t expecting the other stuff. February tends to be our coldest month of winter so I’m hoping for the month to go by quickly and if it’s like the fall and early winter it should be warmer than usual. I can only hope.
Looking at this screenshot, this isn’t one of my best performances–in fact probably my worse in quite a while. It was pretty chilly that day and I didn’t take the time to warmup before I started. I like having all the split times, and cadence which is something you don’t get with the Fitbit app. I was surprised by my cadence because I thought it was a little faster than that. I’ll have to work on picking that up a bit. Swiping the screen also give you your heart rate recovery information. As a CABG patient that’s important to know. A little more detail on the route map would be nice but it’s not the end of the world for me anyway. I just learned but haven’t tested it out yet is you can double tap the Watch screen to get manual split times when I use the Workout app. The manual calls them segments. I’ll have to try that soon and let you know how that goes.
Maybe you’ve noticed my workout routines vary every week. Sure, the activities don’t change much but the day, duration, intensity of each week varies. I’m a type A person and plan everything but I also try not to be a slave of my schedule. I guess you need discipline as well because without it blowing off an entire week of workouts would be pretty easy to do. What I’m saying is, have a plan, have the disipline to stick to it but be flexible enough change it up a bit. Especially, if you are tired, sore or ache. You have to listen to your body. Sometimes a workout day becomes a day of rest and a day of rest sometimes becomes a workout day.
Tuesday I made a rest day. Wednesday was suppose to be a more intervals and some short distance running but… the blister on my right foot is much worse than I thought. Since I’m retired now and yesterday was a rest day I didn’t have any reason to put on shoes. When I finally put on my running shoes Wednesday morning I realized the blister was “big time”. In March, I had a nice callus in the area of this blister. Not so much now. I’ve drained the blister several times with a sterilized needle but I guess I need to take a blade to lance the blister a little larger so it continues to drain. With shoes, I can barely walk. On the plus side I did go to the gym to do some weight training.
I did try to run a 5K race on Saturday but I came up short because the route wasn’t 5K. My Fitbit measured only 2.2 miles. It was a low-budget race. No bibs, no clocks, timing chips, etc. There was portion of the route you were supposed to run twice but very few understood that part. Oh well, I ran 2.2 miles and that’s the furthest I’ve gone since my bypass surgery and I got to run somewhere new. The route was hilly. My Fitbit showed 147 feet of elevation. I was hoping to average under a 12 minute per mile pace but with the terrain it ended up being a 13:22 pace.
Monday started with a .75 mile tempo run. The goal was to finish in 10:05 but I came up a little short. My finish time was 10:13. Still pretty good especially considering the last quarter of a mile was slightly uphill. After the tempo run it was intervals. 1.5 minute run + 2 minute walk x 4 and 1 minute run + 1 minute walk x 2. Then I finished the workout at the gym lifting lighter weight than last week but did 20 reps x 3 instead of 10 reps.
My first official week of training for a race since the first of the year. I had to scratch my training and running in the Indy Mini Marathon because of the heart issues but now I’m no longer on the mend and looking forward to running again.
oldmanrunningsite 