What ever it takes!

8 miles in the hotel gym. Then we walked to the Picasso museum,  pretty disappointed in that, I´m sure if I was rummaging through some old closet of mine and found a Picasso laying around I'd probably throw it out.

I've had about all I can handle with shopping and site seeing.  I'm much better off if I have work to keep me occupied. 

Nice little 10 mile Jet Lag shaker after dropping Zach off at school this morning.  We got back from Barcelona yesterday afternoon, I really struggled staying awake last night, I went to bed at 8:00, woke up a few times in the night but for the most part slept pretty good.  I'm actually pretty good at recovering from Jet Lag.  The trick is to never sleep more than 5 hours a night anyway :) 

I think my body is telling me it's ready for some structure in training again. I've pretty much just floated through this entire year either recovering from injury or not wanting to get injured again.  But I am able to run 10 - 12 miles a day pretty easily, sub 7:00 pace is starting to feel sustainable again, and I haven't really felt pain anywhere for a couple of months now.  This isn't a real great time of year to start training for anything, cause there isn't really anything, so maybe I'll just try and throw in some intervals here and there, try to get my weight back down and then kick it hard come January 1st. to get ready for Boston.  This is the part I really struggle with, I've really enjoyed the second 1/2 of this year, just relaxing, no pressure but I think I'm ready to see what I can do with all my newly aquired experience and wisdom.

Take back what I said yesterday about jetlag, I couldn't sleep at all last night.  I forced myself to lay in bed until 4:00 then I got up and went to the gym.

Pretty hard workout for me, 2 mile warm up and then a 9 mile progressive tempo in 60 minutes, started at 7:30 pace ended at 6:15, then a 1 mile cool down in 8:00.   Nothing ground breaking but it put my body in a bit of a shock.

No comment!  just a link I found interesting in light of Lance Armstrong.

http://goo.gl/fzCDW

Since there are homeless people in Golden Gate park that have shoes in better shape than mine were I broke down and officially retired my 3rd pair of Nike Frees.  I was never a Nike fan because I thought the quality was poor, but I am so impressed with the Frees, I got over 1200 running miles out of all 3 pairs I owned, and my last ones I started wearing as just my everyday walking around shoes as well, so who knows how many miles they actually had on them.  Not to mention the 350 elliptical trainer miles this year.

So what did I replace them with? Another pair of Nike Free's of course, I decided to try the 3.0's this time.  I pretty much love them, I'm not sure why I ever wasted money on other shoes when I just always fall back to these.

I ran 10 miles on the treadmill at 8 mph then I decided to do some intervals, 10 x 160's (.1 miles) since it's easy to keep track of on the treadmill.  .1 with .1 jog in between.  I started at 12.1, 12.2 ..... up to 13 for the final one.  at about 12.7 mph I felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest, but it was fun to get the legs moving like that again.  I haven't done those is a long time.

Damian Stoy is one of my local running hero's. I really envy his outlook on life.

http://wholisticrunning.com/2012/10/16/bridger-ridge-barefoot-run/

12 miles in 1:26:20  7:11 avg pace.  I was a bit sore from my sprints yesterday, I also think even though I love my new shoes the 3.0's are quite a bit more minimal than the 5.0.  I was starting to feel some soreness in my arch towards the end of the run.  Maybe I should switch it up a bit until my feet are used to the new shoes.

I'm going to throw this out for the sake of argument.

Say you were (just for example), a young cyclist in your early teens.  You were pretty good at it, won your age group at the Utah Summer games in Ceder City and decided you'd like to see how far you could go, so you join a local team enter some local races and get on the podium every race, your coach convinces you and your parents your good enough to start racing at a national level, so you do that for a while and decide you are good enough to make a career out of riding bikes, you put the rest of your life on hold, school isn't a priority, all you care about is riding your bike and your coach has convinced you that you are good enough to make a living at it.  So you turn 18, realize there is no money in cycling in the US and decide to move to Europe, you get on a plane fly to Europe meet your new team of European cyclists, go on a couple of training rides with them and quickly find out maybe your not as good as you thought you were, these guys are blowing you away.  All of a sudden all you have worked for, all that time you spent on your bike seems like a waste.  Then your new coach approaches you with the solution.  Ethically you don't agree with the solution but realize he's probably right, what do you do?  Get back on the plane, fly back home giving up all your life time dreams, or move on to the next level?

I actually rode with a guy in high school that went through that very ordeal.  He now works at Bingham Cyclery in Sunset.

If you get these running tights you can see if you're getting a stress fracture as you run.

http://www.nikeblog.com/2012/10/18/nike-exclusive-print-x-ray-tights/

Couldn't sleep last night so I went to the gym, got there just in time to catch the busses for the SoJo marathon.  I thought to myself "I wish I was running the marathon" not sure why I thought that, cause I really didn't.  Funny how we think.

Pretty crummy workout today, plan was to do a 12 mile progressive tempo but at mile 6 I got a side cramp I just couldn't shake.  Took a bathroom break, but still couldn't get running normal again.  Ran 3 more miles and just gave up.  I don't usually cut my workouts short but I just didn't feel like running another 3 miles was worth it.