Week 11 & 12 CIM Training

Week 11 of CIM Training encountered some variation due to season changes, for not only dark in early morning, also rainy in Bay Area.

Monday Oct 15th, I was out with friend and stayed up quite late. Originally was thinking to try out my new running shoes, Brooks Pure Cadence, at San Tomas Aquino Trail, but forgot my headlamp so no way I could run there in absolute darkness. Ended up waiting a little bit till morning broke, and did couple laps at a high school track. My lower back was hurting a bit, so I skipped Bikram Yoga on Wed this week.

Felt bad about the 2.42 miles run only this morning, so decided to join Vinh and Albert for their Tue evening run at Sports Basement in Sunnyvale. We started out from the store and ran on Aques toward the San Tomas Aquino Trail. Took this flat course as a great opportunity to test run Brooks Pure Cadence again, because I felt this morning was too short and too slow to see how it actually would perform. I mute the Run Keeper and ran without audio cue & music, just ran as fast as I felt like it. Target was 9:00 pace and I was feeling great. However the streets were dark and the traffics were annoying, all the headlights from cars bothered me a great deal. So as much as I like the training, I don’t think I like to do this again. Morning is much better, even if it’s pitch dark. 6.56ml at 8:58 pace.

Thur Oct 18, Eric and I tried to run our usual trails, but several times we were stopped by trees or fork of road wondering go or no go. By mile 2, we decided to ditch the dirt trails and switched to paved fire road instead. We chatted while running and agreed that for the next two weeks we would run on paved path until the daylight saving time ends. 7.05ml at 9:52 pace.

Sat Oct 20th, since there would be an Half Marathon in Livermore on Sunday, I did not plan to run on Sat. However I found out Fernando would be running at Los Gatos Creek Trail which he seldom does and I haven’t seen him for a while, decided to meet him up and catch up with what’s new with our lives. He is a very smooth and fast runner that runs with little effort, when I said “run with him” I was only good for the first couple miles – my kick ass run equals to his laid-back warm-up run. We were chatting about the possibility of his coming to Japan for race support in Feb, and my Happy Hour conversation with Christian about what it takes or sacrifices to qualify for Boston. Pretty soon Max came up from behind and I let them taking off without being sandbagged by me. I ran a comfortable pace of 8:58 for 8.10 mile.

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Sunday Oct 21st, Grape Stomp Half Marathon in Livermore
What’s supposed to be a beautiful, small, local race turned out to be a nightmare. I have never experience such ill-organized race. I drove up to meet with Venkat then we carpooled to the race in this chilly Sunday morning. I lined up to pick up my bib and shirt, and found it’s under staffs for race day bib pick up. The lines were getting longer and longer while we waited anxiously for the 8:00am race, but we saw the start arch and timing clock weren’t even in place by 8:20. No one came out to tell us when the race would actually start, nor could we see which route we would take off. Venkat and I went out to do some warm-up run, came back and waited a bit. Then went out again for another warm-up run. I saw people started going to restroom after standing and waiting for what felt like infinity.

Finally at 8:28am the arch and timing machine were set and the gun went off at 8:30. I felt that I was running at Los Gatos Creek Trail because the route wasn’t closed, and we shared the path with walkers, bikers and baby strollers. I was looking for Gatorade at the second aid-station, but did not see any, and hoped there would be some at the next station. But turned out that throughout the whole race, there was only water, no Gatorade, no GU, and no snack. Only water. By the time I got to the open & exposed vineyard portion of the course, the sun was ahead of me and I was feeling dizzy. My pace started to slow down as energy drained from my body. I came in 1:55 and did not PR of course. What a horrible race experience, however do learn something from this one. Be self-sufficient and self-supported at race, you never know what kind of surprise you would encounter.

Tue Oct 23rd, I happened to have an hour window in Sunnyvale before meeting a friend for dinner, so decided to switch my dark morning run to evening run. Extra bonus is one hour sleep with a radiator on in chilly morning. I started my run from Washington Park near Mathilda, a street that I was getting quite used to visit six months ago. I ran along the Evelyn because I knew there would be very few stops since I would be running parallel with CalTrain route. The streets were dark and very  busy with rush hour traffic, glad the new Petzl Tikka XP 2 headlamp worked very well. The bike path was empty and I was able to run somewhere between 9:00 to 9:15 pace. I never ran this route before, but did look up Max’s RunKeeper data so knew that I should be able to do at least 5 mile out and back if I turn around at 85. That evening I managed to run between the CalTrain Sunnyvale station and Evelyn station, interesting run – 5.7ml at 9:19 pace.

Thur Oct 25th, today Eric and I gave up the dirt trail and had a pre-race tune up run, because we both would be doing Morgan Hill this weekend. He would pace the 4:20 Full while I pace the 2:10 Half and I intended to do 20ml long run that day. So this morning we took it easy and ran on the paved surface and did 7.31 mile at 9:30 pace.

Ready for this weekend’s Morgan Hill Marathon + Half now! Going to be hot~~