Another three

Yesterday I ran another three miles during my lunch break. This time I ran solo, at the track near my home, and only walked about ten steps of it.

Goodness, is running any distance on a track BORING. It was nearly empty so I ran part of it clockwise instead of the traditional counter-clockwise, but it only helped alleviate the boredom a little. But mostly I just kept plugging, and finished at a slow and steady 13:30 pace.

So now what? I guess I learn how to do it better. The first  mile and a bit was brutal - I just wanted to STOP - but I pushed through it and was reasonably okay the rest of the time. My knees were tight yesterday and today as well, so my exercise today was 30 minutes of swimming which seems a good alternative.

Tomorrow, assuming my knees are okay, I think I will return to the track but do intervals - what, specifically, I don't know. Perhaps running fast on the straights, trotting the rounded ends, and alternating running and walking laps? I'm totally making this up as I go.

Tonight I'll be spending time with friends as it's the third anniversary of my friend's husband's death. I will be really appreciative of life and fitness and being with good people. I will also marvel a bit at how much has changed in three years - it was one of the nudges I needed to move back to Portland, but I sure wish he was still alive!

A routine? and a milestone!

I might be settling into something that resembles a fitness routine. My top priority is biking, but I do want to do justice to learning how to run. Right now it looks just possible that my weeks will look like this:
Saturday & Sunday - bike rides, of increasing length and hilliness
Monday - rest
Tuesday - run
Wednesday - swim
Thursday - run
Friday - rest

I want to enter both the biking and running with relatively fresh legs, and swimming seems like a good alternate way to exercise and burn some calories. We will see if I can settle into this pattern!

Something crazy happened on Saturday. As I said in my last post, I rolled back my c5k training and last Tuesday I spent time on the track alternating between running and walking. When it was time to run, I pushed myself pretty hard for 30 or 45 seconds, and then jogged the rest of the 90-second interval. It seemed to go pretty well, and my run time was an impressive sub-10-minute mile! But I didn't feel like I could sustain that pace for ANY amount of time. On Thursday I focused on sustaining a pace for the entire run time, and my pace was more like an 11-minute mile, and I was really ready to drop at the end of each chunk of running.

My running friends were certain I was running too fast and needed to try a slower pace, but I don't know how to gauge that. So on Saturday (instead of biking!) I went for a run with them. People, I ran three miles! That's 5k! We stopped at the midpoint for a little water, but I didn't feel like I HAD to stop. On the way back my ankle hurt a bit so I walked for maybe 15 seconds before resuming our very slow trot.

So, this running stuff is definitely coming together. Crazy.

Then on Sunday I did a 40-mile bike ride that has me back to being nervous about my ride in September. So this weekend, no easy 3 miles of running for me, no sir, back to the bike I go.

Back to it

Well, I'm back in town after two absolutely terrific weeks in Hawaii! The highlight (of course!) was my brother's wedding, which was SO lovely and SO fun and just perfect in every way. It was fun getting dressed up in a really pretty dress, I liked all the people I got to meet, and the rental house I shared with family & friends on Oahu was just terrific. After the wedding week I spent nearly a week on Kauai with friends and that was also great.

But now I'm back and fitness is the name of the game. I ate pretty healthily and swam a lot on my trip, but only tried running twice and it was pretty close to a failure both times. I was in theory on week 5 of Couch to 5k and just couldn't make it through either workout I tried. So, I'm going to have to roll back the calendar and ramp up again.

I'm signed up for a 7k on Saturday August 9th. I already know it's wildly unlikely I'll run the whole thing, but I have eight weeks to prep for it. I can't seem to fit a week of c5k training into a calendar week, but I think I'll start at either week 2 or 3 and just do my best to fit in what I can.

More important is the bike riding. I returned from my trip on Friday night and hit the road both Saturday and Sunday this weekend. Saturday I did some hill riding - any route with a street named Skyline in it is going to be hilly! We rode 20 miles and did about 2500 feet of climbing. I didn't do too badly (or my friends were struggling more than I was...) and I attribute my relative strength to the running. However, Sunday my buddy and I did 35 miles of flat and I was just. not. feeling it. I got a flat at mile 6, and struggled to settle into the ride for the rest of the time we were out there. My friend was doing better than I was, but we were both feeling pretty whipped by the end of the ride.

When my alarm went off Monday I had no idea where I was or why I was getting up! I guess it was a triple whammy of jet lag, vacation ending, and sheer exhaustion from the biking. But, onward and upward from here!

Busy weekend!

This weekend was super busy. On Saturday I rode 55 miles on my bicycle as part of an organized event called Reach the Beach. I rode this several times in the early 2000s and it's always been my favorite ride. For the most part, it's super beautiful, and it's very well organized with rest stops every 12-15 miles. May can be a risky time to do a bike ride in Oregon, but we got crazy lucky with the weather this time!

Saturday at the coast

I was riding with a friend who's been dealing with a pretty big range of life, work, and medical issues, so she didn't have a lot of energy and hadn't been able to ride much lately. She tried so so so hard and managed to ride 40 miles. She decided to stop at the third rest stop, since she'd been reduced to stopping every mile to try to gather some energy. I felt badly for her but agreed it was definitely the right call!

That left me to do the final 15 miles solo, but I didn't mind very much. At least it was sunny and warm, not rainy and cold like it's been on previous rides! There are some stretches of really hideous headwind in that final leg of the ride, and my butt and legs were sore from already being on the bike nearly 5 hours, but I dug out my last bits of energy and actually finished the last leg in 75 minutes, which was quicker than I'd estimated. It remains clear I have a LONG way to go before Cycle Oregon.

Sunday at the work party

Yesterday I spent three hours on a work crew in that same friend's yard - for the same pile of life, work, medical issues, her massive yard has gotten well and truly out of hand. About ten of us turned out and spent time in the cloudy rainy day taming that land! It's more yardwork than I've even done at my place! I didn't mind working in the rain at all - way better than biking in it!

A try-athlete

I've been a cyclist for a long time - I was fortunate enough to work with biking-obsessed friends in the late 90s, and they pulled me along into that world. I certainly have many years of relatively few miles, but this year will be more high-mileage as I train for and ride in Cycle Oregon in September. Including the 400 miles ridden during that week, I should do more than 1500 this year - one of my highest-mileage years!

I've already been training some this year, though I've also been a bit busy. I'm doing a 55-mile organized ride this weekend which may be interesting, as my longest ride so far was a few weeks ago and was 30 miles. So.. we'll see. It's my favorite ride, I'll be with a friend, the weather looks acceptable, and we can take lots of breaks if we need to!

But I'll admit, Cycle Oregon has me worried. Add to that the fact I have lots of weekends when I will not be in town, and only some of them will be road trips where I can bring my bike... I've got to do something else to help increase my fitness!

Enter: running. I've never run before (I like to joke that I run when chased) but it's appealing in its simplicity - strap on the shoes and head out! However, like so many things in this life, I'm finding that it's not quite as simple as that. I've been following the Couch to 5k program and completed week 3 on Saturday. Just as I hoped, I did two of the workouts while traveling for work. However, apparently it's not right if your lower legs are on fire while running, so today I got fitted for different shoes. I'm hoping this will make it easier and more enjoyable! I haven't minded the time at the track, and I get a kick out of watching the insanely fit and speedy teenagers who are there working on various skills with their coaches. I don't really know how to figure out pace and form, but I think the most important part is to learn to run without my legs aching after thirty seconds - I can worry about technique after that. 

Finally, because I'm not being complicated enough, I've started doing a little bit of lap swimming. Wow is that good exercise - my app that I use says 30 minutes of swimming is about 500 calories, vs about 200 for my slow run/walk or about 300 for my non-speedy biking. Not that I actually swim continuously for 30 minutes, mind you! But I can do a full lap, stop and breathe, and then do another. I'm almost always doing the breast stroke with some side stroke or crawl mixed in.

Right now my biggest problem is figuring out when to do all the activity! Since I'm so new at it, I always want to run on fresh legs, so I can't do it after any volume of biking. Biking is most important because of Cycle O. Swimming is a good rainy-day exercise, but we're moving into our better weather. I ought to be running 3x/week, but it's already having to slide a little for cycling. I'm mostly going to do the best I can and take it from there.

I'll be in Hawaii for two weeks in a little while, and will definitely continue the running and swimming - I already found a community pool a mile from where I'll be staying that offers lap swimming, and perhaps I'll get to test that theory about the simplicity of running. September is coming! Gotta be fit!

Tracking spending

It's time to start a new notebook for tracking my spending. That's right, I track what I spend. And yep, I do it old-school. In 2007 I bought a tiny, awesome notebook from my neighborhood stationery shop (remember those? the shop went out of business shortly thereafter after nearly 100 years in the same spot), and I resumed tracking my spending after several years' break. This time, the habit stuck!

I know I tracked my spending for a while in the late 90s or early 2000s, but I can't remember what I did with the information, and I don't think I did it very long. I know I was inspired after a bout of reading Your Money or Your Life (highly recommend) but I  don't know if I got much out of it.

Perhaps I was in a better place financially when I started tracking in 2007. I know I started it easy: in June, I tracked grocery spending only. In July I added restaurants. By September I was tracking all my spending, as far as I can tell, and even started sorting it into categories. The categories changed a bit over time: by the end of 2007 they were: groceries, eating/drinking out, coffee out, bills, entertainment, gifts, charity, travel, transportation, clothing, household, upkeep/health, misc. In the intervening years I've added hobby (typically cycling and knitting expenses go here), booze, and house. (Household expenses are things like a new spatula or set of sheets; house expenses are things like a ladder or the yard guy.)

It's fun to look back and remember - at the beginning of 2007 I was just under 20k in debt, including grad school, my small car loan, and a credit card. In July 2007 my notes show I had 70k saved for retirement - more than my salary, and not bad for 36, but not super amazing either. Thanks to the power of writing things down, I can figure out by what percentage I've increased my salary (thanks, Past Me who negotiated hard during one promotion!), by what percentage my retirement savings have gone up (thanks, markets and Continually Diligent Me!), and by what percentage my bills expenses have increased (okay... you can't win 'em all).

Anyway, those notebooks above represent seven years of data. I'd be really bummed if I lost one, but more importantly they represent a really great habit I've developed. Now I'm starting a new notebook and I think I'm going to adjust a little bit of the way I track things - large lump-sum expenses like for travel or furniture won't show up in the monthly figuring, just the annual, so my month-to-month spending can be a little bit more apples to apples. But I'm definitely busting out that book to keep up this routine!

p.s. I'm partial to using hard-to-find pocket-sized notebooks from Spain. Last time I bought three, and am opening the second. I'm kind of thinking about buying a few of the latest model to have as backup against the tragic day (...in six years...) when I log my last entry.

I'm still here!

Whew, it was a busy February, but somehow March is getting away from me as well. Let's see. I'm still loving the blue wall. I haven't decided what I might paint the rest of the walls, and I've had a few votes to leave them intact. That pleases Lazy Me, as it turns out that painting is messy and time-consuming!

So, I tried painting over the sample splotch in the living room.
Before:

After:

Well. There is a SLIGHT shade variation - I think perhaps the bathroom paint is a bit lighter than the rest of the rooms, and I must have used that, as the can isn't labeled well. So I have one other can to try before I either buy a really big print, or repaint at least one wall. Fingers crossed.

And yes, I did get a new couch - AND a coffee table. I identified what I wanted (Crate & Barrel Petrie, IKEA something) and found them on Cragislist, saving me 800 and 100 dollars, respectively. Pretty sweet! Please note the flowers from my yard. Spring has sprung!

And the kitty is still hanging out a lot. And he still cracks me up.