Week 5 (of 20) -- A NEW Personal Record!!

This week Mark and I were in Fraser/Winter Park, Colorado for his annual Berkeley physics grad student reunion, so I didn't get to do the track workout on Tuesday. In fact, I didn't even get to workout at all on Tuesday, since we decided to take the train out to Colorado which essentially took all day Mon and Tues. The train ride was very nice, though, so I don't even mind the disruption to my training schedule. ;-)

On Wed, we went for about a 7 mile hike over mostly flat terrain in Rocky Mountain National Park. That was cool. In addition to getting ourselves acclimated to the altitude, we saw a couple of Moose, a heard of Elk, and some Bighorn sheep during our hike!

On Thurs, I attempted to run about 4 miles of the 3-5 miles we're supposed to run on Thursdays, but I felt awful. I went running along the gravel road that our rental house was on, but I decided to turn left from the driveway which turned out to be a mistake. It was the up direction. The first mile was nice: flat, and even a little downhill, but after that... it just up, and up, and up. It wasn't steep but there was no sign of flattening out either, so I ended up turning around after only 1.5 miles for 3 miles total. And it took me almost as long as it would take to do 4 miles. Not a good run. But, at least I gave it a good shot, and perhaps the altitude (~8600 ft) had something to do with it, too.

By Sat, though, I was on cloud 9 in the training-happiness-meter, again. "Why?" you ask. Well, Zoe saw an advertisement for the Fraser-Winter Park Run for Independence, a 5 mile run from the Winter Park ski resort to the nearby town of Fraser to benefit The Vacation Kidney Center for kids on dialysis (which I also happen to think is a worth cause -- kids with kidney disease should be allowed to enjoy the mountains, too!). Since I was scheduled to run 4-6 miles this weekend anyway, I decided to sign up... literally at the last minute. I was one of the last 5 people to register on Sat. morning. The course was mostly flat and even a little downhill, and the beginning wound around along the river for a bit which was nice, but then it went out to a path next to the main road, which was not so nice. But the part I was most excited about was my time! My official time (see here, I'm on page 3 listed as Lisa Lakata, bib #404) was 56:55.4 (min:sec), which translates to a pace of 11:23.1 (min:sec) per mile! WOO HOO! I have never run anything faster than 12 min/mile and here I am running less than 11 1/2 min per mile and that was even at an altitude of ~8600 ft. That's the equivalent of shaving 3 mins off my time from my fastest Wharf-to-Wharf race and in only week 5!! (Can you tell I'm excited?) I placed 22nd (out of 29) in my age group, though I have no idea how I was overall.

So, even though Thurs was not so good, Saturday's run was awesome! And now I'm excited to try 10 miles next weekend!