Friday Tidbits

Once again, I'm back with another bullet point list of things going on.  Life is busy, so that's all I gots time for.  Here we go:

- It is amazing to me the difference 10-15 degrees makes for Tucker.  Last night, he barely scraped by to run 2 miles in 80 degrees and high humidity.  This morning, it was 65 and still very humid, but we conquered 4.5 miles together.  I was drenched at the end from the humidity, so I can only imagine how he felt.  Regardless, he showed no signs of impending death this morning, whereas last night I had to practically carry him the last .5 mi.

- I don't recall too much running with Tucker last summer since I was primarily hurt, but I wonder if he will be able to acclimate at all.  Without sweat glands, its gotta be difficult to deal with summer heat.  Guess I better get used to either early morning runs with him, or dragging him down the road for a 1-2 mile death march.  I think you can guess which option I'll be choosing.

- I was supposed to race a 5k 2 weeks ago, but started getting sick the night before, so I scrapped the idea.  I am planning to run one this weekend, but am still debating which race to choose.  My cardinal rule of 5k races is not to spend more than $25 for entry (both races I'm considering qualify).  The big question up in the air is which race to do.  One I am pretty sure I will place relatively high in, but cannot guarantee much of a competitive field, which will make it more difficult to run an optimal time.  The other will likely be pretty competitive, but the course is not published and the area around it is pretty hilly.  Which one do I go with?

- While I've been running lots since the marathon, my training focus has been pretty slack.  I did this for a number of reasons.  Primarily, to give myself a break from hard training, which I strongly believe we all need.  But secondly, I don't have a goal race.  Why force yourself to push, push, push if you don't have a goal race.  So I say, sit back and enjoy running for what it is - a leisurely activity.  The other reason is that I was waiting until I get a 5k baseline test done before I start focusing on anything.  I'd rather know my optimal training paces than make a best guess it them.

- Representative of my lack of focus has been my running log.  Up until last night, I had not downloaded all of my Garmin files into SportTracks since the marathon.  Yep, that's 2 months!  It took me a LONG time to get those files loaded, but I'm happy I did it, because I can finally get back to tracking training stress.  With a slight uptick of training in advance of this 5k, I've wanted to see where my training stress is.  There is a great tool within SportTracks that provides a training stress score (TSS).  I use it religiously while training for races...obviously not so much right now.

That's all for now.  Have a great weekend!