Did the Strength 1/B workout from New Rules of Lifting. Just for fun I stopped at the gym that Lifetime Fitness bought over on W. Lake Houston in Kingwood. This used to be QLS. It is most definitely not up to the standards of a LTF. The weight room was a mess and they don’t have towel service yet. I think their one interesting feature is their pool. They have a saltwater swimming pool. Next time I’m due for a swim workout and I’m in that area I’ll check it out.

Here are the splits from this morning 7 mile run with the Kingwood Fit running club. The average pace for miles 5 and 7 was a little bit fast. Have to monitor that more closely next time.

Today was the first meeting of the Kingwood Fit running club for the 2010-2011 season. This year I am one of the coaches for the yellow pace group. We had a really good turn-out for today’s meeting. Here are a couple of pics.

NW Cyclery

I stopped by NW Cyclery today to pick up my packet for tomorrow’s Katy Flatlands Century ride. I saw this daring fellow in the parking lot out front:

Just had one workout scheduled for today. Instructions were:

Run 9 miles - warm up first 2, then next 7 at tempo

I did this up in Kingwood fairly early because a group of us from Kingwood Fit who had run the Chevron Houston marathon and half-marathon were meeting at Starbucks (all wearing our finisher shirt). Here are the details from the run. I walked for 10 minutes as a warm-up first, then did the run part as shown in the following table. Then walked for 9 minutes to cool down.

I took a few pics at Starbucks. Here is the Flick photo set:

By the way, Elaine was looking for a head coach for the yellow pace group for the next season so I volunteered. I don’t have any real experience but the main duties are to help pace the runs and also to write some articles for the weekly newsletter. I’m pretty excited about this!

Triathlon Training, day 96

The scheduled training for today was to run the Texas Marathon, held in Kingwood, Texas. This was my first marathon and I don’t think I could have picked a nicer one. I think there were a total of about 550 runners. We met at one of the parks in Kingwood and the coarse consisted of 4 laps on a stretch of greenbelt. It was a bit crowded at first. Eventually things cleared up as folks settled into their natural running or walking pace. The greenbelt was in pretty good shape — just a few patches where water and/or mud covered the path.

This was a training run for me. My instructions were to run two miles at endurance followed by three miles at tempo, then repeat until done. I finished 92nd overall with a time of 04:26, and felt perfectly fine at the end. At one point I stepped off the right side of the path and re-twisted my right ankle (which hasn’t been right since the 25K Rocky Raccoon trail run. So that’s just a bit of an issue, but nothing too bad.

Here are my splits from the run. Again, for the first lap, my target heart rate was zone 2 (endurance), for the second lap my target heart rate was zone 3 (tempo), etc.

You can see all of the details, including the GPS map, here.

Run – 22 miles Had a marvelous birthday run! Was pretty cool starting out.

Run – 30 km + 2 miles Our Kingwood Fit running group had a 30 km (18.6 mi) run scheduled for this morning at 07:00. Coach Kt had assigned me a 20 mi run today. So I decided to do the Kingwood Fit run and just add on a couple miles at the end. The weather was great and we had visitors from the Woodlands Fit club running with us. All went well except that I somehow manage to stop the timer on my Garmin Forerunner 305 for a significant part of the event so my recorded times and distances are whacked. For example, you can see from the recorded track that, apparently, I can run on water!

Glowarama Illuminated Art Car Parade

Mikie surprised me with V.I.P. tickets that gave us access to a party upstairs at the George R. Brown convention center. There was food and drinks and we could watch all of the festivities from a large balcony. There was a light show set to music that was projected on the side of the convention center above us and on both sides.

Here is a Flickr photo set:

And here are 3 short videos that I posted to give you an idea of what the light show was like:

I had an appointment this afternoon with Dr. Joseph Muscat at Fondren Orothopedic Group. I had seen Dr. Kerr there in the past but that rascal finally retired.

Basically I wanted to find out if I was doing some kind of serious and permanent damage to my left knee by continuing to run on it, in spite of having pretty much continuous pain.

I had figured that Dr. Mucat would be a good resource. He had given an injury-prevention seminar at one of our weekly Kingwood Fit meetings. I was not disappointed. After checking things out he told me that it would be OK to continue to run on it as long as I could stand the pain. At some point, when it gets bad enough, he will want to do an MRI and the go in and clean things up. There would be a 6-8 week period of time before I could resume training at normal levels.

That was all I needed to know to make a decision. If I had the procedure done now, then I miss another season. If I can put it off until the end of the season, that would be the way to go. Enough said!

Dr. M. did write me a script for some Voltaren (diclofenac), a topical anti-inflammatory cream that I can put on the left knee area a couple of times a day, so hopefully that will help out the situation a bit.

Morning – Running with Kingwood Fit Group Details Duration: 01:47 Distance: 11.71 mi Energy: 1695 kcal You can see the route and the splits here.

Swimming – Mod-easy pyramid Description WU: 4 x 100 swim done as 25s each of kick, R arm only, L arm only, swim. MS: The even intervals are done at 5 seconds slower than 100 T-pace. The others are relaxed swims with good technique. Recoveries are in seconds within parentheses. 100 (15”) 200 (20”) 300 (40”) 400 (60”) 500 (60”) 400 (60”) 300 (40”) 200 (30”) 100. CD: Easy combination of kicks and strokes for 10 minutes. Total: 3300