My Life My Words

Fitblr shirts

A few people have asked where I got my fitblr T-Shirt from since I posted my last photo and I have to be honest I made it myself. I was running through Central Park and there were so many other runners and I thought to myself.

“I wonder if he/she has a tumblr and if they are a fitblr  or runblr”

Anyway seeing as people were asking I put some of spreadshirt if you want to get one.

click here

I thought they would look quite cool during races for both runners and spectators.

Thoughts

As a runner I feel we have lost our innocence today.

As a community we will show that we cannot be broken.

Well I totally messed that up

My marathon training (Day 3) called for 5 Mile ‘Bursts’ which I had never heard of unlike Fartlek Intervals which I used to do with my running club back home.

I decided to dive deep into the realms of Garmin and see if I could set the intervals up on my watch and HAZAA you can! Or you can if you don’t mess it up, like I did. 

So the basis is you go in, pick what type of training session you want and it works it all out and like magic it syncs to your watch and that beeps shouts and vibrates at you as and when you need to change pace.

(Can you see the problem?)

So instead of picking a pace that I wanted to work to I chose speed!! and I got it so, so wrong. All was well until my first recovery kicked in, it worked out that I should be running a 15:00 - 12:00 minute mile. I wanted it to be between 9:00 - 10:00.

So every 10 seconds my watch was vibrating and beeping at me and the whole screen lit up with SLOW DOWN… but I don’t want to slow down!

The run was good and even with the Garmin mistake. Central park was alive with runners but I think I need to figure this one out in time for the repeat session next week. I think I need sessions like this to keep my running mixed up and hopefully improve my overall pace. I just need to work the thing out.

Sometimes I find it hard to motivate myself

Sometimes I come home from work and all I want to do is crawl in to bed and get warm and cosy. It’s easy to do, I’m sure you have often thought the same thing. This time last year I was living alone and quite often I would do just that. No one would know, it would be just this once.

Well, once turns in to twice.

Twice has the habit of turning in to thrice.

And so the rock starts to roll down hill and you find yourself after a few weeks or months pilling on the pounds and creeping to where you were at your start point. 

Tonight would have been one of those nights, It would have been easy to come home climb into my warm bed and close out the sleet, wind and snow falling outside.

Luckily I had made my mind up yesterday to follow the same Marathon training plan that Chris had found on Mens Running UK Magazine.

(16 weeks of pure hell right there!!)

The great thing about this is that Chris is highly motivated and as per Paragraph 6, subsection C, article ii of the roommate agreement he has to make sure I stick with it too. 

We got home at 5:30 and bundled up, well one of us did. the other insisted on wearing shorts!

(Feels like -2!!)

The run was great, we jogged down 56th Street to the water and there we set off. My run was no where near as fast as his but I was pretty pleased considering how horrible the wind felt as I was running north. 

As I hit the turn at 2 miles the wind was behind me and I immediately felt warmer and shed the gloves. The hat came off soon after.

I’m so glad that I have kept up with getting back into this. I’m starting to feel better already, both physically and mentally - It’s official, my next Marathon will be in DC come March 16th.

What a difference a week makes

I am sitting here on the worlds ugliest couch watching Family Guy, after a great meal*, feeling pretty good about myself. 

A week ago I wrote a fairly honest post about how I was feeling about my current fitness level. How I wanted things to change for the better and get back to where I was last October. 

I decided to go out for another lap around Central Park to see how things would compare after 1 week of conscious eating and working out again and I think the results speak for them self. 

                       Week 1                                                 Week 2

I managed to take 5 minutes off of my 10k time in 1 week. 

The run felt fantastic this evening. After the first mile and a half I had warmed up enough to just seem to get in to a stride. Last week it seemed a real effort to do the run without stopping. Tonight I felt like I was able to attack the up hill sections and use the down hill sections to increase my stride length and glide along as I recovered. 

Its moments like this that I remember how much I used to enjoy running and I’m looking forward to fitting in a run during my day off on Thursday (Thank you America).

I’m going to start weighing in on Wednesdays from now on. Last week (Monday) I was 97.3kg (214 lb.) but was far to upset with myself to post that in last weeks post. We shall see what Wednesday brings. 

On another note I am incredibly humbled by the multiple messages of support I received last week and I noticed that many of the people I follow also decided to kick off a restart of their own and I’m really excited to see how things go for all of you.

*It actually tasted really good

Things to improve on

Last night I manged to go out for my second run this week which if you look over my past few months of activity is a pretty big deal. I have decided to use these 2 runs as my marker, my - It can only get better from here - if you will.

Firstly can I just say how much Manhattan fucks with your Garmin! to get to Central Park I have to walk 2 blocks. Plenty of time you would think for your Garmin or any other GPS device to lock on to a signal, right! WRONG!!!

I was running with Chris, we both have Garmin watches. He has the more slimline 410

I have the Triathlon (obviously at some stage I had an idea that I wanted to run an IronMan…. Silly Rob) Version, the 310xt

Now you would think that other then the screen size and the waterproof housing this would be the exact same GPS components in each version….. Hahaha, NOPE!

As we were running my watch said that I was 0.1 mile behind Chris after 1 mile. Now that doesn’t seem like a lot but lets say we were training for a marathon and we went out and did an 18 mile run, separately one of us would have run 1.8 miles less then the other! Does that worry anyone else?

As the run went on Chris and I were seeing what happened with the distance each of our watches were reporting and I have to say at the end of the 3.1 miles mine had caught up

The reports…

Now considering we ran together and started and stopped our watches at the same time (mine said it had good signal at the start) It looks as though mine thought I was starting in the middle of the park rather than the loop.

Is this a fault or do you think this is the buildings causing GPS issues?

either way it’s annoying as hell when you are trying to keep track of your progress.

Any way back to my point of laying down my marker times to be improved on over the next few months.

5k - 27:48

10K - 1:00:52

Do any of you get strange results from time to time from your GPS devices? be it a phone or a watch I would like to know.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon Series 2013

I just purchased my Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour Pass for 2013. Since moving to New York I wanted to find a fun and interesting way to explore as much of the US as I possibly could. What a great chance to check out some great American cities while keeping fit at the same time.

So I can do as many of these as I want and not pay a single penny to register. Looks like I’m going to be getting lots of air miles over the next 12-14 months…. Look at where the tour goes to!