Another lame entry

My legs felt good this morning. I'm glad I went out to run on Tuesday, even though my calves were still very tight from Sunday's long run. Tuesday night I had my monthly massage (gee, that's a good word for the nodcast). Sometimes I go right back to a hard workout the next day, but since I'd done my "speed" session on Tuesday, on Wednesday I just did a double session on the trainer, mostly really easy stuff, because that's what I do. Along with some stretching, the extra rest did my legs some good. Thursday I did not work out at all. The morning was hectic and then I got stuck late at work. Since I'd skimmed an interesting article linked from one of Michelle's blogs I made it a point to work as many varieties of leaves as possible from the salad bar during lunch. Going a step further, I added spinach to my dinner of fish and corn. Woo-hoo! BTW, if you are sick of sites like the Times and Boston.com always trying to get you to register, just block their cookie and you can read all the articles without registering. But you already knew that, right?

Today the ground was mostly clear and the temps sort of mild, so I headed out for a tempo run. My plan calls for some of these to be 2 miles on, 1 mile off, 2 miles on, etc, so that is what I tried to do today. On both of my two mile tempo pieces I faded in mile two. Some of this may have been due to the terrain, which consisted of frozen tractor ruts in a few places, with quick mid-run squall providing a sprinkling of snow for camouflage. The fast parts were on better surfaces, like roads in the cemetery and smoother carriage paths. Here are the splits:

7:52, 7:43, 7:01, 7:21, 8:01, 7:06, 7:23, 8:54

How much time do you think you lose running on dirt compared to hard surface? I have trouble running under 7 on the soft stuff, but usually seem to be able to pull it off (huh-huh) in races.

More bone-chilling cold on the way for next week. I'll probably stay off my feet to get ready for the Paddy Kelly 5 miler in beautiful Brockton next Sunday. The week after that we have the Old Fashioned 10 miler in Foxboro. It's time to start ramping up the bike hours anyway, so maybe I'll get more serious on the trainer. Thanks for reading.