Jun 19 - p

 Meet my shoes...

They make my front door hard to open on my apt-cleaning days when I stack them so that I can sweep the area.  I rotate between 1 pair of shoes at work (the brown ones that look like a black hole in the middle of the pile), but I have tons and tons of running shoes.  Girl's gotta have her shoes, right?  On my recent trip to Mexico & Pton, I packed 5 pairs of shoes!!!  1 work shoes, 1 flip-flops, 1 Steeplechase spikes, 1 clean walk/run, and 1 light but good pure run.  That's a lot. I'm a pretty Spartan person, so that feels a little excessive, but a Spartan's gotta have good equipment to work with!

FIT:

It's always satisfying to kick off your shoes after a run and to see a good layer of mud along the sides and back edge.  It means you did some work.  I wore the pink ones in the front today for my AM run.  Yes - AM.  I've wanted to use lateral motion and hill-activated muscles, instead of repeatedly pounding the 1-degree treadmill muscles, so I went out at 6:30am to the park to get in a run before church.  That's the coolest part of the day @ 72 degrees.  It was still warm, but much better than the full-sun, full-heat part of the day. 

It's interesting how as the run progresses, just going naturally, your times drop as you get into the groove.  I started off much slower than usual, but by the end, the times were clicking by faster with the same amount of effort.  I normally always run at night (9pm), but with the need to keep my legs and mind happy, I may have to do some more of this outdoors AM running.  Running outside is so mentally refreshing.  Running inside is, too, but you get another dimension of happiness by being out in nature.  We'll see.  Since I'm not that experienced with outside running, it will be interesting to analyze all of the potential datapoints and training observations of how my body responds differently in the morning.  Takes longer to warm up, probably.  When I first woke up at 5:30am (after going to bed at like 3am - strange... I normally don't have trouble falling asleep even after long daytime naps), my legs still felt a little recovery-ish... you know that feeling when you feel like your legs are a little sore or growing or something?  Not something you really feel like running on, but as you get moving, the feeling goes away.  I wonder what the physiology is behind it... human growth hormone doing its repair/buildup work?  Muscle repair & bone repair that only happens at night? 

Anyway, went out.  Enjoyed the run, listening to podcasts.  Right knee a tiny little bit yoinky today, but nothing I'm concerned about.

5.1 in 43:50, 8:31 ave.  434 Cal.  NB 1224s w/ Oxysox and Sofsol arch supports.  No visor or shades really necessary in the relatively low light.
Splits> 6:47, 6:29, 6:20, 6:15, 6:10, 6:04, 5:41.  

0.734 MI/LAP.