The past couple weeks have met really nasty weather in the southeast. Nothing has been particularly catastrophic and the roads haven't been a huge issue, for the most part, but there have been temperatures down into single digits and, most problematic of all, the sidewalks have been largely impassable with snow and ice. I may or may not have made clear before how much I hate treadmills, but if I have, it's worth reiterating that they're one of the last pieces of exercise equ

The internet is an amazing and terrible place. It allows just about any joker to write things and broadcast it to fairly wide audience. I probably fall into that category as well, but I always make an effort not to seem dogmatic about my views and recognize that everyone's body is going to work differently and will respond differently to pretty much any circumstance you can think of. I'm also not an expert, but I do have some personal experience to work from. That said, I f

For some reason, I'll periodically hit stretches of time where I make a lot of progress in distance, time, or both on my runs. I had recently felt like I was running along on a plateau and then suddenly, it felt like my times started dropping fairly dramatically. In one of my last posts, I noticed the downward trend of my times for long runs, and I have continued that trend this weekend. Yesterday, I got my 10 mile run in with an average of 9:21/mile. My pace is getting m

When I graduated high school, my sister gave me a book called Letters To A Young Poet and I've been trying to finish it for over four years. The book is a collection of letters written by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke just after the turn of the century to a young man who attends the same school and happens upon Rilke's published works. In addition to the letters is some background on Rilke to give you some context as to what is going on in his life as he's writing thes

I've been having some solid distance training this week. Wednesday, I started pushing my race paced runs up into the 5 mile range and then today I had a 9 miler that averaged 9:39/mile. RunKeeper brought to my attention that this was a personal best pace for that distance which led me to check through some of my other long runs to compare. Looking at my 7-10 mile runs that I've tracked with RunKeeper, my pace has steadily been going down from averaging 11:15 - 11:30 minute

I had almost forgotten what today was when I was waking up, but luckily I had set a reminder to myself that went off just in time. This morning is when registration opened up for The Bear. They said that it went online around 8:00am and I registered well before 8:15 so I imagine I was one of the first. After I missed registering for a couple years due to it filling up, I have been determined to not miss it again so I set alarms and make plans for it now. The Bear has been

Getting up to run is always harder when my body isn't feeling 100%. I was a bit hesitant yesterday to get going on my long run because my back was feeling pretty tight and one of my legs wasn't feeling great. My long run had already been postponed to Sunday so I knew that if I bailed on it again, I would not feel good about that at all. Fortunately, it was in the high 30s to low 40s when I was looking to leave so I didn't have an added obstacle of obscenely cold weather.