"Long" Run and Some Boot Camp Challenge Photos

Assignment today was to run 80-minutes at whatever pace it took to finish.  The plan was to run it this evening with the SparkPeople/Rock gang, but with scattered thunderstorms popping up, I wasn't sure whether I'd have the chance.  So I took an extra long lunch and did it inside on the treadmill.  Without headphones.  I don't normally run with headphones, but 80 minutes on a treadmill without visual or aural stimuli is mentally exhausting.  I had to play pace/time/math games in my head to occupy myself.

It was hard.  I don't know whether the treadmill is miscalibrated or what, but I ran most of the time with the setting at 6.5 to 6.8, which is supposed to be an easy pace for me, but it felt fast.  Nike+ is recording me at about 30-45 seconds per mile faster than what the treadmill says, and normally I'd figure on the Nike+ being wrong.  But I don't know.  My level of fatigue, by the halfway mark, sure made it feel like Nike+ was right and the treadmill was wrong.

Whatever, the point was to finish, and that's what I did.  I ran for an hour before the time limit on the treadmill expired, and then quickly rest it for another 20 minutes.  I covered the last mile doing strides and recoveries, which both felt good AND exhausting.  My HR during the final 30 minutes was in the mid to high 150s, though my breathing was too labored.  That's another area I've lost touch with: my heart rate benchmarks.  I'm assuming my HRmax is 175 and lactate threshold in the neighborhood of 158-162.  But I don't know anymore.  The cardiac drift I experience makes it hard to tell, since 140 during the first 30 minutes of a run feels like 150 during the second 30 minutes.  Today, it wasn't so much my heart/lungs that was tired, so much as my hips and legs were starting to weary.

The ankle I hurt on Saturday still feels a little tender at times, particularly at the start and later when I start to fatigue.  I'm thinking I'm might succumb and check in with Mike this evening to have him put the electrodes to it.  That scares me a little.

No run tomorrow.  Not sure what I'll do instead other than some strength training.

Brightroom pictures from the MCRD Boot Camp Challenge are in.  I didn't get any good individual ones.  I was hoping to see some of me going through the obtacles, but there's just the one of me coming out of one of the tunnels, partially obscured by one of the other participants.  I'm sucking some wind.












Our group shots at the finish line were pretty good:

Jenny had probably the best photo op of the bunch:

And Jimmy was captured the most:

They captured Christy crawling through the "barbed wire"

And Jenny too:

That's all I could find.  None of Michael.  Maybe he was just too fast.

You know, that whole thing just gets more and more fun in my memory, the further away we get from it.

PS.
LOL -- found another photo of me?  :->