The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 13 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
I signed up on Wednesday to run my distance first race ever1. I’ll be running in Henry Weinhard’s St. Patrick’s Day Dash, a grueling 6.11km race taking place on March 14th in the Queen Anne area of Seattle.
The race starts (3rd and Mercer) and finishes (5th and Harrison) by the Seattle Center and follows this route:
Some other people from Convergence are also going to be running it, including JoEllen, who I went to Haiti with and who sent out the original email, and Robert, and maybe Rebecca? Dad is also running it, which should be fun.
With only a little more than four weeks to go, I thought I’d better start practicing now (cramming doesn’t work as well with races). I devised an aggressive, but hopefully achievable plan for training.
| Week | Thursday | Sunday | Tuesday |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 5/1 x 4 | 7/1 x 3 | 10/1 x 3 |
| Week 2 | 12/1 x 2 | 15/1 x 2 | 17/1 + 12 |
| Week 3 | 20/1 + 10 | 22/1 + 5 | 25/1 + 5 |
| Week 4 | 27 | 30 | 35 |
Explaination:
5/1 x 4: Run five minutes, then walk one minute; repeat four times
17/1 + 12: Run 17 minutes, then walk one minute, then run 12 minutes
27: Run 27 minutes
I broke out my Nike + iPod Sports Kit and set out on the first day of training:
I think one of my biggest problems right now is keeping a consistent pace. Based on how I ran, my goal is to run about a 5 minute kilometer (about an 8 minute mile). In order to keep pace, I determined that I need to take 167 steps per a minute2. I already have many the estimated BPM data for many of my songs in iTunes. Thus, for Sunday’s run, I’m going to try running to songs that are in the 160-170 BPM range and hopefully that will help with consistency.
0I ran 330m hurdles in high school a couple of times junior year…seven years ago ↩