6 in 60?

Yesterday's endurance run was scheduled for 6 miles. My son had hockey practice at the "outdoor" rink in Kenai, so I decided I would run my 6 miles there. His practices last an hour, so I knew the big challenge would be, could I get the whole 6 miles on before practice ended. I told him that if I didn't show up in the locker room right at the end of practice, that I'd hopefully be in shortly. After getting his skates on him, I headed out to start running, since I also knew that I had a scheduled warmup to do as well. I figured I could probably get away with shortening the cool down walk.

The distance around the outside the rink is about a tenth of a mile, which means 60 laps does the trick. Luckily, I don't have to count them myself. That is what my trusty Garmin Forerunner 305 with the accompanying footpod is for. It beeps when my cooldown period is over, based on and again at the end of the set mileage. I love that thing. I just wish I could locate my heart rate monitor strap again.

So my run went pretty good. Better than I expected really. I ran my 6 miles in 58:33, and I had hoped to do it within an hour. I even got slowed down a time or two by hockey players from the previous game clogging up the running lane as they were leaving, but you don't mess with hockey players. You just slow down for a few seconds, get around em when you can, and then carry on. I haven't downloaded the info yet to get a full analysis of my speed throughout, but even simple math tells me I was averaging just over 6 MPH, so I feel pretty good about that.

Next week's workout pattern is the same as the first two have been, but I run 7 miles on Saturday. After that, things start to switch up a bit.

I also found a new club I want to join. It is the United States Running Streak Association. Their website is located at www.runeveryday.com. In order to get your streak listed, you have to run at least 1 mile per day, every day, for 1 full year. I'm going for it!!!

I found one more thing this week that has helped improve my workouts -- a list titled "The Top 100 Workout songs of the 80s." I've always been into music quite a bit. RIght now, my music genre of choice is country, but most of that doesn't make good workout or running music. The list I found was pretty darn good. I found that I already had about half of it on iTunes. I downloaded the rest this week and now use it as my main workout music.