6 Miles - 2/1

I haven't been posting much in this blog for the past couple weeks (obviously!) - mostly because nothing I've been doing has had much significance. But that doesn't mean I've been idle. I've mostly been doing some pool time as well as short runs. Many of the runs have been with the dog - since I have doubts about his endurance for longer distances, and I've also heard that dogs will keep going even when they shouldn't, in order to keep up - I wanted to start him off on runs that take about as long as one of our park walks. The other reason for shorter runs was that I just wanted to give the surgical repair from December more time to heal.

For the sake of jotting everything down, here's the summary of what I've done over the past few weeks:

Jogging:
1/24 - 1.8 miles, 17:42, avg HR: 157
1/26 - 3.4 miles, N/A (forgot to start HR monitor!)
1/27 - 3.4 miles, 32:55, avg HR: 158

Swimming:
1/17 - 30:28, avg HR: 149, power: 45-50
1/23 - 29:33, avg HR: 164, power: 50-55
1/28 - 33:35, avg HR: 148, power: ~50

The past few days, I had been wanting to go for a longer distance run. Mostly to test out the waters post-surgery, but also because I can only run loops in the neighborhood so many times in a row without going crazy. The problem has been that the weather has been cold enough to keep the ice and snow on the sidewalks from melting. Today it was a bit warmer though, and with it being daylight, I figured I'd give it a shot. It might require fancy footwork, result in wet feet sloshing through puddles, and jumping out into the road when able and jumping back onto the sidewalk when traffic approaches - but it was something different.

Total Distance: 6 miles
Total Time: 1:00:21
Avg HR: 165

So, my first thought was 'oh crap, here I am back at 10 minute miles again', followed by 'I hope this doesn't mean I'll effectively be starting over from scratch'. I guess we'll see - but I suspect that a good 30 sec/mile would be knocked off if I were to go do that loop again within the next two days. Unfortunately, that will not happen due to work and few daylight hours - but I might be able to do the loop twice next weekend and see what happens. Regardless, I should be able to do the 3.4 mile loop in the neighborhood a few times this week - so we'll see if todays exercise will help those times, and provide a comparison for the shorter runs over the past few weeks.