Since I’ve been having shin splints recently, I made a chart of my running activity to see what was causing it. It looks like I went from running around 1 mile/week (during the winter) suddenly up to 11 miles/week. In the 7 days leading up to feeling pain in my legs, I actually ran 15.8 miles.

So, clearly, I need to ramp up my running more slowly, maybe at a rate of one or two miles per week.

In the last seven days, I’ve run 3 miles. I’ll probably try to do one more run this week, perhaps on Saturday, for two miles (this can be my “long” run).

Yesterday I ran a mile at a 7:07 pace, which wasn’t bad for me. That’s on Strava.

Didn’t have much time to exercise today, but I figured another a sub-7-min mile would at least help me maintain my fitness. (Missed yesterday — this week has been completely nuts and I actually did this run around 9:30pm.)

Felt pretty good about the pace, I went a bit too fast in the beginning because I couldn’t really track my pace in the dark.

Run is on Strava.

New PR for the mile: 6′ 51″. And on Marathon Monday too!

Maybe I’m not so bad at this running thing after all.

Feels great to be in the “6 minute club.” Definitely a lifetime record.

What I did differently:

1. I was kind of ticked off after my bad bike ride yesterday, so I told myself I was going to set a PR this time. In recent runs where I had run the mile in around 7′ 20″ or so, I felt like I could have gone a little faster, so it seemed reasonable that I could break my 7′ 11″ record.
2. I ran the first few laps quite fast — faster than the required pace. Even though I was getting out of breath as usual, I realized that all that pain would be wasted if I didn’t continue pushing to get a record.
3. Obviously some of my previous workouts have paid off… I basically used my idea that “if you’re not wheezing, you can keep going” and kept myself running just slow enough to not start wheezing. Because of my previous workouts, this turned out to be roughly on pace.
4. I stopped looking at my watch after the first three laps or so. (out of nine laps.)

Went to the indoor track for intervals this morning. My usual workout is 2.67 miles.

I managed to push through the first mile in around 7:58 with some serious shin splints, but I had to stop after that. I took a five minute stretch and went down to the bike room to finish the workout. I did six more sets and felt pretty good about the whole workout, although I generally find it harder to get my heart rate in the target zone on the bike.

Overall, I think I probably need to reduce my mileage a bit and put in some cross-training; I’ve ramped it up fairly quickly. This weekend I’ll be out of town, so I’ll probably skip the 6.5 mile run I have scheduled. That should give me a little time to recover. I’ll replace it with some kind of interval exercise like burpees or biking.

I added the run manually on Strava. It lists it as 0.9 miles even though I clearly typed in 1.0 miles and the speed is computed with 1.0 miles as the distance. Honestly, Strava seems rather buggy.

On Mondays, I try to run two miles, running for as long as I can at my goal pace (7:00 mi).

About half a mile into my run, I realized it wasn’t going to be a good one. I was wheezing; telling myself I would walk after the first mile; overheating in the 40 degree weather. I managed to avoid walking, but I took the second mile fairly slowly.

I had done a quarter mile warmup with no problems, but poor performance on one of these morning runs isn’t uncommon for me. In general, I don’t seem to be able to run well in the morning. I’m too hungry and tired to drag my heavy legs forward, and grogginess turns into the usual feeling of drowning at relatively low speeds. I’ve managed to counteract this somewhat, at times, by eating lots of pizza the night before; in this case, I ran 5 miles last night, so I did almost the opposite of what I needed to do.

Moving my runs to later in the day probably isn’t an option. It would just make it too easy for me to skip workouts. Currently, I have a decent rule for skipping workouts (aside from injury concerns): if I wake up on time, I work out.

Even though my speed wasn’t great, I was definitely hitting my target HR (160-170) for most of the run, so I should have gotten a decent cardio exercise.

Overall stats are hard to say. Right after the run, my watch reported that I had done a 9:27 mile average, with exactly 2 miles. Strava puts me at 8:33 miles, with 1.9 miles run. I wonder if the difference is that Strava only counts “moving time” — so if I stop at a light (which happened several times on this run) it doesn’t count.

I do think it’s probably fair to say that I did the first mile in a bit less than 8:30.

Amusingly, according to Strava I set two PRs: for my 400m and for a segment of the route called the “Foot Bridge to Western Avenue Sprint.” Indeed, on that segment I improved my ranking from around 1700/1968 to 361/1968!  (I imagine this is because most people don’t sprint that particular segment, but rather run it as part of their usual routes.)

Run is on Strava.

Did a night run down into Boston. I slightly overestimated the distance on this loop, so ended up going only 5.2 miles instead of 6 miles. This was my long run that I was supposed to do on Saturday, so I took it pretty easy and with a 10:05 mi/min pace. One interesting thing to note was that the pace shown by my Garmin while running, the pace shown by the Garmin Express app, and the pace shown by Strava all seem different. I’m going to believe Strava since its numbers seem the most realistic (based on how I felt during the run).

BU has a nice campus and every time I run through it I imagine what it must be like to be a student there. Probably pretty fun.

Currently deciding whether to do my run for today right now, or wait until later this afternoon to take advantage of the warmer weather.