As logical as the situation may seem, it took me literally months to come to the conclusion that trying to run my first marathon in June or July was not a great idea. Despite the fact that there are - rightfully - not many marathons in those months, I was still trying to make it happen until I eventually came to the conclusion that my high sweat rate and proclivity for running in the middle of the day do not mix well with 14+ mile training runs this time of year. After many

Catching Up: The Bear Hill Climb Almost a month ago, I ran The Bear race, a 5 mile run up part of Grandfather Mountain. If you've even poked your head in on this blog occasionally, you've more than likely seen me mention it since it's a pretty big deal for me. For years, this race was the reason I ran and the reason I would keep myself in shape at all and this was my sixth year running it. I'm very proud to say that I crushed my previous best time of about 1:03 and posted a

Hitting the proverbial wall when running is never a fun thing. Quite the opposite of that, in fact. I'm not entirely sure why, but lately I've been running headlong into a wall right around the 4 or 5 mile mark of most of my long runs. Needless to say, it's been a frustrating process trying to figure out how to get around this. I've had this happen on longer runs where around mile 10 I'd start feeling like I'm slowing down, but the past three or four times that I've gone o

Last week, I began experimenting with a new morning routine. Some of you may recall earlier Run and Drum posts that were kind of precursors to this idea, like the one about how much more productive I felt after making my bed or getting up early to get a workout in and get the day started, but I've taken a slightly different tack with this new one. The past couple years have seen me take different approaches to mornings depending on what I needed to do that day and where I ha

I've never run a race before that really required a substantial recovery period. Though, in the past, I often would neglect my training for weeks and months after running The Bear. The point is, dealing with a recovery period is somewhat uncharted territory for me, but I figured it necessary for a week or so after my half marathon. After the race, I felt pretty good. Nothing was in pain or hurting, but I was definitely fatigued in a way that seemed appropriate for the long

This past week has been a pretty intense stretch of training. I actually ended up hitting personal records twice this week for pace and for distance. Tuesday, I had an easy 3 miler scheduled and the weather was pretty great. At that point, I hadn't been able to run much recently due to weather and travel so, without realizing it, I got a little wound up and was moving along at an abnormally fast pace for me. When I got my audio cue at the half mile mark and heard that my a

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

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

I got up nice and early this morning to get a little 3 miler in. It's typically tough enough to get out of bed knowing I'm going to get outside and run in below 30 degree temperatures, but then I looked outside and saw how foggy it was and was even more discouraged. Fortunately, the fog burned off relatively quickly and I didn't have to feel quite so much like I was running through a half evaporated lake. It feels incredibly good to be back running 4-5 times a week. I had n