Then today we took the girls out on the kid carriers on the bikes and rode around the neighborhood.
The view across the harbor. . . .
It looked like a swan convention! I've never seen so many gathered here! The Natural Resources folks from the state want to cull down the swan population in the Chesapeake Bay since they're non-native and eat the water grasses, but I'm cheering on the side of the swans.
Just enough snow to eat off a bush. . . .
Well, that kind of put it all back into perspective in a big hurry! It made me laugh. Maybe I can get a second job as a lawn ornament:
| 5K | 0:29:48 |
| 5M | 0:49:13 |
| 10K | 1:02:26 |
| 10M | 1:43:04 |
We all wore Garmin Forerunner 305s, but I managed to screw up the data on mine badly by not turning it off correctly at the finish line. Nevertheless, here (below) are some CHARTS!
The course satellite map is below in solid blue - out and back along a paved rail-trail. They slightly altered the course this year which cut out some hills and made it a little faster. That's the Severn River just south and parallel to the race course, and part of Annapolis, Maryland toward the southern end of the map.
Pace data: We were trying to maintain an even 11:00 min/mile average, and were very comfortably below that starting out, but then fatigue set in after some accumulated mileage and I couldn't quite hold the pace. I was really struggling the last few miles, but Chuck and Dave kept encouraging me to STAY STRONG!
I messed up the Garmin data a bit by hitting the lap counter wrong and not stopping it, but the data on the first few miles don't look like we started quite as fast as the chart above suggests, but we probably did go out a few notches too fast.
I can't say that I was thinking such nice things during the actual running part - more like I was just running hard to try to catch him so that I could stick a knife in his back and make him stop haranging me - but I'm glad to have it done and in the books. Now I feel ready to take on the half marathon distance again at next weekend's race and run it as hard as I can.
Happy Birthday David!! Thanks for kicking my butt!!
Catherine has surprised me lately with some things that she has remembered.
And did you get a load of that FELT that Jason Donald of Slipstream rode to his amazing 2nd-place finish?
Seen alongside my old saddle (below), it's quite similar, but I'm hoping that it will redistribute the forces in a slightly more comfortable way with denser gel over a slightly surface larger area. *fingers crossed*
Elisabeth loves my old helmet. Maybe I shouldn't buy a new one quite yet.
Catherine enjoyed some corn on the cob with gusto last night. It was some of that new pre-packaged pre-washed microwave-in-the-bag stuff. Quick and easy to fix, certainly, but it tasted weirdly too sugary to me. I'll try nuking regular corn-on-the-cob the next time instead.
On the way heading south we were riding into the wind and you can see my heart rate climbing and climbing as my pace declines steadily. The wind was increasing as we rode, up to about 10 mph with gusts to 15 mph. You can see a squiggle where we rode over the Knapps Narrows bridge (at miles 16 and 21) and then got into the shelter of the wind a little bit on the island.
Average pace for 7.01 miles, according to Ms. Garmin, was 11.51 min/mile. If I can keep that pace up on the B&A Trail Half Marathon in 2.5 weeks, that will give me a PR by 1 solid minute. But I'm definitely not counting any PR chickens yet! PRs are gifts from the Race Gods and happen according to their whim. PRs can be prepared for, the groundwork can be laid for them, but they cannot be summoned at will. But it should help a lot to have my training buddy David there who has volunteered to pace me, I hope! He does a pretty good job of flogging me along!
As for me, for a seasonal activity, I get to figure out how to get out red crayon that some nasty gremlin put inside the baseboard heater that melted and dripped down onto the carpet. I've been looking around the Internet for cleaning ideas, and they all look tedious. Little monsters!!!!
Happy Valentine's Day to my dear readers! And even to a few of those not-so-dear readers!!!
Shouldn't you replace your helmet every year or so? Isn't it important for, uh, safety or something like that?
Caution: Disgusting stuff warning. Don't read if you're feeling queasy.
Chesapeakeman registration just opened up, the best little iron-distance race in the country, which is held just 45 minutes from my house.
I know some of my blogger buds are of a religious persuasion, so I thought I'd start looking into the up-to-date modern-day Word of God just to keep in touch with that line of belief. Lo and behold, I found The Word on a couple of blogs that He authors:
It's nice when they're being friendly, a horror when they're not!
My 3 1/2-year-old daughter Elisabeth, you may recall, is apraxic (severely speech delayed), mainly due to delays from being a micro-preemie, having open heart surgery at 5 months, an extremely rough recovery from that (overdosed twice by hospital error and resuscitated once), and a feeding tube down her throat until she was over 8 months old. She's coming along well now and she's a healthy, happy girl with her development holding steady at about a year behind Catherine in everything except speech - she can only pronounce a few sounds and therefore only a very small number of understandable words. She has good comprehension and does know quite a few ASL manual signs, but since her manual dexterity and muscle tone is low she is still fairly vague with them. Elisabeth attends preschool five days per week while Catherine happily hangs out with me.
It seems I had a little upwards heart rate creep even while my pace slowed down slightly by the end. I wonder if there would have been less heart rate creep if I had carried water and didn't get very slightly dehydrated by the end. I'll check that another day!
It's a little disturbing (to me at least) when your 3-year-old tells you in the middle of the night, "Mommy, my eye is broken."
I tried something new yesterday which was pretty tasty - Green Giant frozen premixed Lo Mein. Now I usually think of mostly noodles with Lo Mein, and this was mostly veggies with a few scant noodles, but it still tasted good. Mostly frozen broccoli and carrots with a big frozen packet of sauce. Very quick and easy to make - I just thin-sliced some sirloin (it called for chicken or pork, but beef was still good) and stir-fried it in a pan (I even added some diced orange peppers) and added the stuff and it's done in about 10-15 min. Ate a huge half-the-pan portion for not too terribly many calories (500 or so) and saved the rest. My girls even liked it (which means it wasn't very hot-spicy). I'll buy it again! (Especially when the nearest Asian restaurant is a dozen miles away.)
