thursday part 1: 36 x 100

quick bit on today's run. some sleep last night despite sciatica still acting up and causing some itb and nerve pain all down the right side. where did this come other than sitting in a tight cramped airplane?

but at any rate, i was up just before 6am with a heart rate now back down to 48. still high, but not crazy high like the past two weeks. out the door to run at 6:20 and headed over to king edward park to run some striders; gail to join me later. a nice cool morning with the sun already up for awhile. mostly dog walkers up and around and a few people biking to work and school. did a loop around the park to warmup and had 15 minutes in when gail came out.
the workout was a simple on- coach benson's old standby- 36 x 100 with a 100 jog recovery. i added stopping to stretch the itb every 12 striders. thne ran a pretty good workout. despite being tight and in pain- not something i would recommend to everyone, i ran nice and strong and made sure i used the right leg so as not to favor anything and cause other problems and also to keep using the right leg and hoping to help break down whatever scar tissue was in there enough to be able to run with both legs.
this is a workout where you just fall into a nice rhythm and i tried to run them pretty consistently hard, rather than just a few really fast. and that worked well today, with the last 30 striders being within a second of each other and all generally faster than usual. somewhere around the 31st i could tell that the leg was getting tired or tighter might be a better way of putting it. tried to relax more and maintain form. you can tell when the body is saying almost enough or enough. i don't always listen to pain when i start out but i do listen once i am running. your body tells you things if you pay attention. i probably run more often when it says not to start, but i wanted to do this workout and would rather miss an easy run day than a hard workout day. 100's may not seem hard, but run 36 of them hard and you will feel it. a good sign now is that i am able to run them faster at a lower heart rate. hoepfully next week i can start going back to the real track, though it is not nice to have this so close to the house and to be able to run sprints on grass and warmup and down on a dirt and grass trail along the water.

made sure the cooldown was long enough to make it an 8 mile day. this puts me over 2700 miles for the year here so far, my biggest year in awhile. with 40 days to go i will probably be just short of 3000 miles. we have enough travel coming up that there will days that will be missed, but the trips are nice ones and a little break won't hurt. i am definitely stronger than i was last year. and when i get home and start getting some treatment for the pf/itb/sciatica i am hoping i can gain some more speed. plus i hope to be able to run some with faster people. will have to find a good mix of running and the rest of life as there is so much more to do there and stuff that needs to be done. much more free time here even if everything does take longer to do. just being away from this house will be better.

onto the rest of the day- lots to do: back later for part two i hope.

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from crooks and liars blog ---

Stephen Colbert delineates the way that John McCain attempts to diversify and distinguish himself from George Bush: by the way he characterizes his stances.

It’s no secret that one of John McCain’s biggest challenges as a candidate is distinguishing himself from President Bush. I’m not sure why he’s eager to spurn President Bush’s supporters. I mean, that’s walking away from almost 29% of the American electorate and nearly half the Bush children.

But he’s so different from Bush already. The only issues they agree on are education, immigration, Iraq, abortion, Supreme Court judges, Social Security, tax breaks for the wealthy, wiretapping, trade, healthcare, the Middle East, same sex marriage and Medicare.

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