Category: Running Log

Time: 1030

Temp: 11°C

Distance: ~2.5 km

No running today. Just a brisk walk with the dog on a nice sunny morning. Might head out for a run later on today without the dog.

Time: 1820

Temp: 16°C

Distance: ~2 km

Mornings are a little bit too cool to be working out lungs that haven’t been worked hard in a long time, so I’ve shifted the running to when I get back from work. Still decently warm, and it should give me time to get acclimated. Cold air, warm lungs…recipe for getting sick.

A decent run up and back. Shin muscles (the wife could probably tell me the proper name for those muscles) on my left leg need some strengthening. They get all sore and weak halfway through my run, which makes the left foot very flappy. Doesn’t make for very good running form.

Nala seemed to be enjoying today’s outing, and kept pace with me for about 3/4 of the run.

Weight: a chunky 80 kg

I’m so out of shape it’s pretty pathetic. The house is at the end of along straight cul-de-sac road and using the car odometer, it measured just about 0.7 miles out to the main road, which is just over 1 km. An out and back trip is about 2.2 km, which I’ve done several times walking with the dog. It’s a nice walk. Eventually I’ll be able to do the whole distance and longer without stopping, but for now, I take a walking pause every 300 meters or so. Don’t want to push too hard this early after all. Good way to hurt yourself.

After being cooped up all day, Nala’s pretty enthusiastic about getting out. She’ll trot along pretty nicely on the way out at a relatively decent slow jogging speed, but then on the way back she either gets tired, or bored and slows down to a slow trot/fast walk. Then I end up almost pulling her along (which is almost the opposite of our trip out) and stopping more often to encourage her to keep going. Considering how much running and darting around she does at the dog park and how fast she goes, I’m inclined to think that maybe she’s just getting bored with plain old trotting up the street. I might have to start bringing treats to make it interesting for her.

Time: 0600

Temp: A cool and breezy 5°C.

Distance: maybe a few hundred meters

Just a quick one today. Nala didn’t seem to interested in trotting along beside me. She kept stopping and looking at me, saying “What are we doing out here? Let’s go eat!”. It was her regular breakfast time after all. I think I’ll try again later this afternoon.

This past weekend, I strapped on the running shoes again. It’s been a long time since I stopped running. 9 years ago when I moved to Detroit was when I stopped. There simply weren’t any safe runnable areas around me. Then I moved to Charleston SC, where again there weren’t a lot of decent bikable or runnable areas that didn’t have traffic speeding by at 40 or 50 mph. Sure, there are a lot of runners around. But by then, it had been a few years, and work was busy, so I never got started back up. Since then I’ve packed on about 30 extra pounds and have been missing my biking and running since then. There’s also this thing about the weather too. I’m not sure how people do it around here, running around in 40°+ weather. I can hardly walk out the door to the car in the driveway without having all the life sucked out of me by the heat and humidity!

Now we have Nala, and I decided it was finally time to get off my lazy fat ass and start running again, both as a way to help burn off some of that excess lab puppy energy, and for me to finally get back into shape and drop some of this extra blubber.

Runners and coaches tell people that keeping a running log is a good way of keeping yourself motivated and tracking your progress. That’s what this space is for, my running log.