Back to the Clear Creek Course.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

It was looking like a repeat of last Saturday when I’d gone to a cross country meet, hurried home and picked up Holly to take her to the airport for her business trip to Milwaukee. On that day, I’d failed to fit in a workout and having been essentially off yesterday, didn’t want to have it happen again.

I hit the meet for Marie’s 9 a.m. run. It was at Stow Silver Springs park in Stow where they offer the greatest dog area I’ve ever seen. It’s called Bow Wow Beach and has a large pond/swimming pool for the dogs. I’m not sure what to call it because it’s a man-made body of water surrounded by sand that I suspect was at one time for human beings. Not any more. There were some 30 dogs running all over the fenced-in area, jumping in the water, playing on the doggie playground and generally have a blast the way only happy, care-free dogs can (do any dogs have cares?). The pond/pool/water hazard had to be the size of a football field, so there was plenty of swimming room.

I left there with a little over two hours left before I needed to pick Holly up. Enough time for a run, I concluded and headed for North Chagrin. I had plenty of time to plan as I drove, so I made up my mind I would run the last course I’d run before the injury…my Clear Creek 6.5 miler. On that day, I’d set a course pr by 90 seconds and was completely pumped. It was the kind of breakthrough day all runners look for because it tells them that training is working and they’re moving to a higher level. I had no idea it would be 8 long weeks before I would again be running on a regular basis.

I started the run conservatively. Since I hadn’t run the distance in 8 weeks, I knew that going out hard would likely leave me sucking wind towards the end. I expected to hit a bit of a wall by 40 minutes, but it never really happened and I was able to hold what I considered a decent pace for the entire run. I had decided to check my time when I hit Clear Creek, but to keep running back to the car. I’d been stopping there during the heat of the summer because I’d wanted to dunk myself, but with the temperature in the 60’s, I wasn’t going to be doing that. I was going to be happy with a time around 56 minutes, so when I checked the watch and discovered I’d covered the distance in 54:50, I was pretty happy. I hadn’t really pushed myself and had managed to run only about 13 seconds a mile slower than my best time ever. I finished the run thinking I could get back to where I’d been and better that time by the end of November and maybe sooner. Now I had something to keep me focused.

Run duration: 59 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 140 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 1,000.