Kimi is finally back to running with me! Thankfully. I love to run, but it's so nice to have someone that helps keep you motivated and honest. Last week was a great week. With the weather getting nicer, it has become much easier to lace up the shoes and go for a run. I had a solid week running every day of the week. I came close to messing it up Friday when thankfully Kimi persuaded me to going out and put in my easy 3 miles. Of course, I had to talk her into riding the bike with me, but I managed to get out there and do it. On Saturday, we decided to do a progression run. For those of you that don't know exactly what a progression run is, I'll detail it a bit. A progression run is a run where you start off conservative (easy) and slowly speed up the pace each mile. We started out with a 7:08, dropped it to 6:54, and then made it interesting with a 6:30, 6:27, 6:14, and 6:09. Then followed it up with a simple cool down of 7:14. Since Kimi is recovering from her illness, she went 7 miles, and I went back out to get my 8th mile at a nice easy pace.
Saturday was a pretty exciting day in general. For those of you that have been following my blog, you know that we just recently purchased our first home and are doing quite a few changes to it. One of those changes is outside in regards to a few trees. There are quite a few oak trees on our little lot and one of them was directly in front of our front door. Unfortunately, it was starting to get pretty dead looking and kind of ugly so we decided we would cut it down to make the house look that much better from the street. My brother and his two boys came to town to help along with my in-laws Bill and Lynn. We cut down the oak with no problems whatsoever which made a huge difference for how the front yard feels. Then came the fun stuff. We had 6 trees in our back yard. Now 5. I had intentions of taking two trees down in the back yard simply because they were a little too cluttered together and because I was hoping to open up a little sunlight so I can grow a small garden out back. We have a fairly small yard and there are a few power lines that run near the alley-way behind our house. We started with the smaller of the two trees I intended to take down. In order to be 100% certain we wouldn't come anywhere close to the power lines, we decided to cut the tree down from about 17 feet up. So I climbed the ladder, strapped myself to the tree just below where I wanted to cut and had at it. The idea was to cut a wedge in the side of the tree to make the tree fall towards the center of the yard. Let's just say, I went slightly too deep with my horizontal cut of the wedge which basically led the tree to fall the opposite direction. Even when it started falling, it didn't fully make it to the ground. The tree was now wedged between another tree's branch and its own trunk. And worst of all, the chainsaw was now being pinched and so the troubles began.
After a good 20+ minutes of trying to cut the rest of the way through the tree with a hand saw (not a sharp blade of course) to make it fall, I finally decided to climb down and take a break. In doing so, my brother, Bill, and I grabbed the rope that was tied to the hanging part of the tree. We did just a few strong tugs on the rope getting the tree to shake back and forth when finally, we heard a crack and down it went. Though it didn't go exactly as planned, everything worked out just great in the end.
That was the majority of my Saturday adventure. Sunday, Kim and I decided to head up to the Frisco trail to do our long run for the week. The weather was a bit chilly but otherwise not too bad. I was scheduled to do a 14 mile run and Kimi was shooting for 10 miles. Thanks to our long day of work the day before, our run wasn't blazing fast. Not that it was terribly slow either (still under 7 min mile avg) but not as good as we are accustomed to for our long runs.
To wrap things up, I can definitely feel myself getting more and more motivated along with excited about the next 6-8 months of training. I still have intentions on hitting 3,000 miles this year but that means I am going to have to do a lot of higher mileage over the next several months to get there. If you take my average weekly mileage up to this point, I think I'm on pace for only about 2100 or so. Thankfully we are only about 12 weeks in so there is plenty of time to increase the weakly average.
Week In Review
Mileage Goal = 54
Actual Mileage = 54
Long Run Goal = 14
Actual Long run = 14
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