Like A Duck Out of Water; Weeks 3 & 4

Wow!  Two more weeks have come and gone.  Week 3 was filled with both awesome runs and skipped runs due to injury.  I've bounced back quite a bit in Week 4 but am not quite out of the woods with this calf issue yet:

Sunday:  7 miles @ 9:43 pace; I did three Strawberry Hill repeats.  Somewhere on the descent of the second one my calf was getting tight and achy and of course I ran back up and down the monster hill again.  Calf successfully trashed.  At the time, though, I was having so much fun. I love doing repeats on that hill.

Tuesday:  7 miles, including 5 miles @ 8:24 pace; As I posted before, I tried to do as much damage control as I could Monday for my calf.  The first few miles of this run were pain-free but somewhere around mile 4.5 it started getting achy and I kept pushing through it.  Calf issues aside, I had an awesome tempo run.  This is the first time my average tempo pace has fallen into the 8:20's.  I am so tickled with my progress.

Saturday:  2 miles @ 9:55; So I guess running my fastest ever tempo on a questionable calf wasn't one of my better ideas. I had to skip a couple of runs (including my long run) to let my calf heal up.  This was a short test run to see how it was doing.

Sunday:  7.1 miles @ 9:48; I decided not to try to cram my 16 miler into the weekend and to just continue on with Week 4.  My calf got a little tight about halfway through the run but I stretched it for a bit and was able to finish pain-free.

Tuesday:  8 miles  @ 9:49; This was supposed to be a tempo run but didn't do any speed work this week.  My calf was a little tight but still better than it had been Sunday.

Wednesday:  6 miles  @ 9:22; My calf felt 100% normal this whole run.  I let myself push the pace a little bit.

Friday:  17 miles @ 9:43; This was supposed to be an 18 miler but with the skipped 16 miler the week before I decide to split the difference.  Endurance-wise I felt amazing and could have easily gone the whole 18 miles.  But my calf got a little cranky for a few miles towards the end and I didn't want to push my luck.  We'll see how much this long run has set my leg back.  So far it doesn't seem any more achy than it did after Tuesday's run.



On my 7.1 miler Sunday, Boyfriend came with me to Stow Lake to test out our new DSLR camera.  As I mentioned, race shots were on my list of things I want to be able to do with this camera.  It has a continuous shooting setting which takes 6 frames a second. SIX FRAMES A SECOND!  I passed him 7 times on the one mile loop and he got over 700 shots of me.  If you ever want to know just how crappy your running form is, sit through a presentation of 700 shots of you running at 6 fps.  Gah.  I have LOTS of stuff I need/want to work on and I don't even know where to start.

While he was waiting to see me, he took this sequence of a duck jumping onto a log:

My favorite is of Mr. Duck shaking off the water:

(click on the photo) Look at those water droplets!

Anyhow, imagine a runner instead of a duck jumping out of the water and you can see what this camera can do.  And as Boyfriend said, "I don't even know how to use it!  I am just pointing and shooting."

For those of you who asked, it is Nikon D7000.  I also got an upgraded lens.  It is not light and I wouldn't love to walk around with it for hours.  However you have to remember I am coming from the days of a metal SLR and a metal zoom lens so this thing feels relatively lightweight to me.  It isn't so complicated to use on auto setting, but there is no point in getting a camera like this if you are only going to use it on auto.  I'm hoping to attend a workshop this month to brush up on my photography skills and learn some of the quirks of a digital SLR.  Because anything BUT auto setting is pretty intimidating at this point.