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It’s has been written about by many others much more eloquently than I ever will be able to do. But recently I had been drinking some flavored stuff that we had gotten from a raffle winning. Last week I was trying to force some down on the way into work. (My commute is about 25 mins in the car) I think I finally gagged on it and nearly puked. I finally had had enough of that awful stuff. Free or not, I could no longer drink it. So this weekend I made it out to my favorite coffeehouse, Catalina Coffee where I picked up a pound of freshly roasted Mexican bean. Awesomeness has come back into my mornings. Yay.

This morning an easy 40 min run was stopped early due to pain in my knee. I’ve had this pain before and it’s been on both the left and right legs. Usually it disappears after a couple of days. I only had a 10 miler this sat, so I’m surprised that it’s still painful. It was much worse after the 1/2 marathon, 25k & 30K. Maybe I was so jacked up on ibuprofen I didn’t realize!

On Saturday, due to some after run events that we were required to go to, I ended up letting myself get driven to the park for my  training run. Interestingly enough, the whole event turned into a bad arguement. Mostly dealing with not having MY car there when I returned. The person that drove me assured me that they would be back to greet me with my drink and would be there! There are several issues at work here, but the one I wanted to comment about was about changing of the routine. Many times the couches had said again and again, don’t change your routine if it’s been working for you.  Don’t wear new clothes before a race, change your breakfast before a race. In this instance, I changed my method of getting to training in the morning. Granted, it’s a training run and not a serious run, but the incident made clear to me about the importance of routine. It’s not as tangible as changing clothes or what I eat, but none the less can have an impact. Definitely something to keep in mind for the big marathon day in Jan.

On Thanksgiving day, morning, I went with my girlfriend and a running friend to the Houston 5k and 10k Turkey Trot run. About 7000 people showed up. Last year it was bitterly cold and windy. This year, very warm! Anyways I’ve never really kept track of my 5k time, so i decided that I would see just how fast i could trot this turkey! 23min 59sec for the 5k. I’m establishing that as my 5k PR for now.

A couple of days later, HoustonFIT had their 30k training run. That’s about 18.6 miles. We started at 5:30am witha  color group wave start. Ran for just around 3hr 13 mins. Felt pretty good, except at the end when I got pretty tired. I am very encouraged with my progress this year vs last year. Feeling much more like I will actually be able to finish, or at least, get much farther on the marathon course. Plus I’m gonna estimate that the marathon will take me about 4hr 30mins.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve gotten on my bike. As a matter of fact I even had an email conversation with a friend, who I have biked with in the past, about the fact that I haven’t been riding lately. So today instead of doing my running interval drills, I set up the bike trainer and watched an episiode of FRINGE on the computer while I peddled away! It was a nice change of pace.

I also ordered a running strengthening/stretching kit this morning. Called the Runner’s FitKit it has stretch tubes with it and ankle and hand collars, an instruction booklet and a few other things. Click the link to see it all. Basically I’m looking to add some strength to my legs in an effort to alleviate the IT Band pain that has been a real bother. It’s been much less this year. Mostly cause I’ve lost weight since beginning running last year, but also because I’m in better shape. But it’s still bad enough. I have found that by taking some ibuprofen right before the run I can minimize the effect to where it won’t stop me…yet. I’m worried with the up coming 18 and 21 mile training runs I will be putting that to the test. I think that if I get this kit and commit to doing the exercises religiously up until the marathon (Jan 18, 2009) I might have a chance of getting through this run. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens!