Marathon Man - double digits

Hello Space Cowboys!

A memorable week of training. I had my first 10 mile run and had my first (near) marathon week. That's right, I've run 26 miles this week (.2 miles short of a marathon). That gives me a lot of confidence that I can do the real deal. Especially if I get a week to complete it.

The 10 miles today went real well, for the first 9.5 miles. At that point I was pretty well done. I walked/shuffled/jogged, in repeated succession for the last half mile. Thankfully, since the first 9.5 went really well, I'm not discouraged. It was fairly hot and as I'm writing this, some five and half hours after finishing, I'm feeling the effects of the heat. August is going to be a treat. I also had my first bit of  nipple chafing. Nothing serious, but I've been warned and now I have one more bit of gear to pick up.

Also, on the gear front this week, I picked up a Nike+ SportBand.  Several times when I've done the group runs, the coaches have been a bit unclear on how much distance is being covered. I am also now trying to maintain a steady pace and that's hard when you're running in a new neighborhood and don't know your distance markers. There are fairly expensive gps devices (many hundreds of dollars) that tell you your pace, location and will set the bath for you when you get home. I was looking for something a bit less expensive. The SportBand is 'only'  $60 and gives you your pace and distance. I only had one glitch with it today, I stopped the timer, instead of pausing, for a rest stop. Not a big deal, I just started a new run right away. It's light and doesn't get in the way. It has the additional advantage of auto-uploading your run data to the Nike site. I wish I had a way to intercept that data, but I'm not doing packet sniffing just to capture it. I can, oh, WRITE IT DOWN.

(And, what the hell is it with July. July just got here and now it's nearly gone. Is this the 'time speeds up as you get older' thing?)

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

Posted via email from Lee's posterous