Back outside (at least temporarily) and good runs!

So, after hitting my treadmill Monday due to a combination of dark, cold and (mostly) bad weather, my last few runs have been back outside. It's always a bit off-putting to run in the dark, I'll say, but I still prefer that to the treadmill for some reason.

Tomorrow I am running in a 5K when the temperature is supposed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 16-20 degrees. Brrr... In preparation, I did a shorter run last night and tried to push a bit and had a great run. Feeling good for tomorrow!

The kids are thinking of doing a 1K that is associated with the race, but we'll see how the cold effects that decision. :-)

Hit my treadmill for the first time in about 7 months

Well, today was the first day since early last spring that I was forced to run on my treadmill this winter (well, late fall anyway). I've always much-preferred running outdoors, but when we flip to standard time from daylight-savings time (so it gets a lot darker earlier) and the sidewalks start to get slick, I end up needing to do my workouts in a safer, though much more boring, environment.

So down to the treadmill I go.

The interesting thing is that I had the treadmill set at a relatively-normal pace for myself, and it felt "right" compared to how I would feel outdoors, but my Nike+ was measuring it "short" - that is, it was measuring probably about 0.02-0.03 miles short each mile I ran and the pace reported by my Nike+ during the run was consistently about 10-15 seconds slower than the treadmill and my body were telling me I was going. Bummer.

I'll have to figure out if I need to calibrate the thing for my treadmill, I guess.

Longest Run Yet!

Today I ran my longest run, yet (well, I should say the longest run since I was in college many years ago) - 8.32 miles. Not all that fast, I have to say, but I'm happy to have pushed myself to another personal best this week.

I'm planning to run a 5K next Saturday, so gotta get ready for that, now! :-)

Running a lot more these days

So, I haven't posted much lately, but not for lack of things to write about in general.

One specific thing of note lately is that I've been running a lot more than I have in many years. What's changed? Well, for starters, I got a group of my friends together this year to do the Detroit Marathon in October as a relay team. I told them originally that, because I figured I was the most regular runner of the bunch, I'd volunteer to do the long leg - which was going to be about 7 miles. I've been a regular runner for years but always kind of stuck around the 3-4 miles/run about 3-4 times a week - so I'd normally do about 12-14 miles in any week.

I knew I had to start running more to get ready.

The second major thing that happened this year was that my wonderful wife and kids got me a Nike+! I'd seen ads for it for months and kept mentioning it to my wife and on Father's Day I got not only a Nike+ but also a new Apple iPod Nano to go with it to replace the 2nd generation iPod I'd killed earlier this year!

The Nike+ has had the most significant effect I can imagine on me and my running! It measures and times all of my runs and allows me to see a history of things, look at runs by week, month, etc. It's really a great product that I can't recommend enough to anyone who runs (I wish I knew more people who used one).

In October, I ran the Detroit Marathon Relay - a 7.4 mile leg that my Nike+ measured at about 7.53 miles - and every week since then, I've been doing one "long" run a week of at least 7.5 miles. My longest so far has been an 8.25 mile run a couple weeks back.

I've also been pushing myself to run longer weeks - the week of the Marathon, I ran a total of 20.42 miles and have been increasing each week a bit since, culminating this week in running a total of 24.28 miles (including the 10K I ran yesterday).

I've also added the Nike+ widget to my blog (did that months ago) so it's possible to always see my last five runs if you want.

All is not good, though. In June of this year, just days before I got my Nike+, I injured my knee playing in an outdoor soccer game. I finally got an MRI in September and it turns out I apparently tore a tendon. I still need to have that attended to, but the weird thing is that it doesn't really bother me while I run. Go figure...

Guidelines for a taxonomy

Patrick Lambe recently posted some guidelines I had posted to the TaxoCoP to his own Organising Knowledge blog. I had been looking for others' insights on what might be good/bad or missing from these (or possibly unnecessary).

Ran the Detroit Turkey Trot 10K today!

I had a great run today and I'm very happy for it!

Ran a 48:35 10K as Nike+ measured, and the course was 6.35 (where my time was 49:37). I'm very happy with the time as it's the first 10K I've run in many years.