Monday, October 22, 2012

Autumn Returns

And with it, the rain :D

It's been some time since my last post, the preceding time has been filled with wonderful life changes. I have achieved my weight loss goals and have found new passions to engage and bring fulfillment to my life. First off I have found the most wonderful woman in the world who found my ways not too annoying and agreed to marry me. I live for her!

Zumba is still a passion of mine, but running still is the place I go for healing, meditative exercise. I find the peace of distance and repetition as wondrous as ever and hope to get back to the "hours" of running before my present knee predicament.

If you've read my blog for more than a couple of post you know I like distance, a good run is an hour or better. After starting biking in the summers and going through my knoee surgery I thought I could just pick up where I left off, running 10Ks as my "meat and potatoes" run. Apparently this is not the most prudent method for returning to active running and my knee informed me in no uncertain terms that I was overdoing it. Sin I was well into Zumba, Biking and my new soul-mate I let running slide to the back burner.

Over the past couple of weeks I've made an effort to return to my pedestrian ways and run - with the rainy season starting up again I felt compelled to embrace the spritz. I've started out at half the distance of my normal 10K - running a 5 k from my door out and back. Here's the course:


One thing I noticed was that last year when looking at pace/heart rate I was at 11:31/mi @154 now I'm at 10:00/mi @ 155.

Another bummer was that my Garmin Forerunner 305's battery had seen it's better days and would only last 15 minutes - I emailed Garmin service after seeing prices for that model were in the $300.00 range ( I bought mine at a Best Buy back in 2009. You can tell that there is demand for a product when the price stays solid for that long. My warranty was long gone, but they offered to exchange it for a flat rate $75.00. I jumped on it and received it back just last week.

So now lets see if I can build back up to more "normal" distances. I'm going to try to go slow, but the addictive call of the endorphin is a powerful thing.