8 Miles on Hilly Road! Wow, today was a great day, almost everything was perfect. The weather wasn't as hot and humid as last time, was only in the upper 70s which is far more tolerable compared to the temperatures of the last few times. At one point I felt like I would never wear out but that feeling definitely went away on the last mile, that's when it became a pretty big struggle but I think it was mainly because my drink was completely empty by mile 7 and I rely heavily on fluids when I run, especially when I'm sweating pretty good and tackling some steep hills that seem to last forever. I do need to get some running socks though, I haven't been running with athletic socks and it does make a pretty big difference when you're running the distance, so before I run next I need to make it a priority to get some good socks, the bad socks I've been wearing have been one of the factors which have been giving me blisters on my toes. I only got blisters on my small toe this time but I'd like to end that all together by wearing better socks and toughening up the skin on my feet. I'm VERY happy with the outcome today, this will leave me in a pretty good mood for a while.

Glad to see that everything's going good for you. Do you use Gatorade or water? I was tired as hell earlier because I had been standing up for 2 hours almost straight, drank some Gatorade, and felt much better. Those electrolytes really make a difference.

Also, how long 'til the big day? I imagine that it's soon. If memory serves, it's the 24th, no? Eh, might have that mixed with the iPhone 4 release day...

Rasenganfan2 : I drink Gatorade sometimes when I run but it's mostly Propel that I drink. When I go biking though all I drink is usually Gatorade. Actually I can't stand drinking anything else besides Gatorade when biking due to the fact that no other drink has the same bottle top as Gatorade that I know of and it's hard opening up a bottle when you're biking but with the certain Gatorade bottle tops, you can get a drink with just 1 hand. Below you'll see the bottle I speak of.

July 29th, I've got about 7 runs between now and than (I only go running once a week). I found a nice road out in the country when I was biking that was about 2 miles long and mostly flat, next week or the week after I'm gonna run on it to see how far I can run on a normal road, I still have no idea how far I can really run, running on this hilly road doesn't really count since it's easily 1.5 - 2 times tougher than an ordinary road.






Image upload: 270x328 totaling 13 KB's.

Oh, that bottle! I love that bottle, though I can't find it anywhere anymore D:

Well, if the hilly road is as tough as it sounds, and I know hilly roads, then I'd say you can probably run a long distance.

Rasenganfan2 : They're pretty hard to come by but during the summer you can find them a little easier. Hill running is very good training, maybe sometime I'll take a few pictures of the road I've been running.



06-17-10: 2 Miles on Hilly Road. What went wrong this time was completely out of my control. In the morning I checked the weather and it said it wasn't support to storm until late at night so I spent all day preparing to go running and right before I head out my wife calls me from work to let me know that there's a bad storm coming. I started to run and quit at 2 miles because it was starting to lightning and rain in the distance and I didn't want to be far away from home when it started to get bad. I've ran in the rain a few times for Cross Country in High School so it's something I can tolerate, I don't like it but I can tolerate it. Lightning on the other hand would be just stupid putting myself at risk to run during, plus it was getting really windy and tornado's touched down in nearby towns so I definitely wasn't going to risk it. I'm sure I'll have a few more similar experiences during the next 1 1/2 months. Anyways, I'll try again Monday or Tuesday.

06-21-10: 2 Miles on Hilly Road. Today my leg muscles got really sore and prevented me from going any further, they felt like they did 2 months ago. Most likely this is due to having ridden my exercise bike for 15 miles before running (though I've done that before with no problems).
06-22-10: 2 more Miles on Hilly Road. After spending an hour deciding what I wanted to spend the rest of my day working on, I decided to make another attempt at running which resulted into 2 miles again. Muscles were less sore but they weren't feeling good enough to pull off 4 miles.
06-22-10: 2 more Miles on Hilly Road. About 15 minutes after my 2nd run, I went for another 2 mile run. I figured if I wasn't going to go a good distance in 1 shot, I might as well do a total of a good distance. So today I did a total of 6 miles split into three 2 mile runs.

8 Miles on Hilly Road! Even though this isn't really progress over my current record, I'm proud of this because my last mile was really tough and I was really tempted to quit at Mile 7 but I was able to push myself. Basically my muscles at the end of Mile 7 were really sore, blistered toes (again which is irritating), and I was pretty much out of energy. Just to put into perspective of how strenous running on this road is, doing 8 miles took me about 2 hours which is about 15 minutes per a mile, I could probably do a paced run of 7 1/2 minutes per a mile on a straight road for 8 miles (and actually I'm hoping to run a Marathon distance at about that rate eventually, but for my B-Day I'm not going to time myself, I just want to be able to go the distance). When you've been running for 2 hours straight, no breaks, it starts to get really tough to push yourself toward the end. I may have hit "The Wall" but I doubt it (although possible since I've never hit it so I don't know what it's like, and I did get sick after running but that might be because of the Stacker 3 I took).

I took a Stacker 3 before running, hoping to get an energy boost and to burn off some extra fat, definitely regret it though because them things have some bad side effects. Even though I completely ran out of energy, I completely regained it after I ate and because of the Stacker, that night I could barely sleep, probably took 2 hours to fall asleep and I'd wake up every half hour, probably didn't get more than 2 hours of sleep. Than the following night I still couldn't sleep very well, probably didn't get more than 4 hours of sleep. My muscles are still sore due to lack of sleep I've been getting since running (and the date as of this entry is 07-01-10).

I did do about 16 miles of biking outside the day before running and 8 miles on my exercise right before running so that somewhat makes up for only doing 8 miles but my goal is to be able to do 13 miles on this Hilly Road before I do the marathon and I'm 5 miles behind that goal and have less than a month left! (I figured 13 miles on the hilly road is about the equivalent to 26 miles on a normal road but we'll find out when the time comes to run on a normal road, which is something I haven't had the opportunity to do in over a year).

Anyways, I may have to take a 10 day break from running because of the blisters I got on my toes again, I'll make up for it by doing plenty of bike riding though in the mean time.

1 x 2 Miles. Ok actually this day I had no intentions to go running. I went for a bike ride, did about 18 miles and than I got a flat tire 4 miles from home. I tried to pump it up with my portable air pump but just my luck, that didn't work (I prepare as much as possible for this sort of thing and something like this happens). So I headed over to my wife's Grandpa's house which was about 3 miles away. So I ran 1 mile while pushing my bike, walked another mile and ran the 3rd mile. The reason why I didn't run the entire thing is because my feet were still sore and blistered from a few days ago when I ran and running with blisters really sucks. Also I was also pretty tired out from just biking 18 miles and it was hot out and I didn't want to exhaust myself, especially since I was really low on fluids.

Well tomorrow is the day and I don't think I'm ready for it. However, a slight change of plans, I'm hoping to be able to run a total of 26 miles instead. If I can do it straight that'd be great but I just don't think I'm ready to do 26 miles straight, I've got to many weeks with to little to no training. If I can do like 13 miles and than another 13 miles that'd be good enough and maybe next year I can work on doing the 26 miles straight for my 26th Bday.

Don't leave us hanging! How'd it go? Did you do it? AAHHHH! The suspense is killing me!

07-29-10: 8 Miles on Hilly Road. Well I didn't reach my goal, actually I may have if I had the opportunity to run on a flat road but I had to settle for the Hilly Road. I didn't expect to do 26 miles, especially not on the hilly road. My new goal is to do 26 miles before the year ends.

I've gone biking and running a few times since than but nothing worth recording.

08-12-10: 4 Miles on Hilly Road BUT the temperature was 96 and with a heat index of around 106 and humid. So even though I didn't do a ton on this day, the fact that I was able to run this distance in this kind of heat makes me happy. The heat was awefull though, people probably thought I was crazy. I was sweating really bad as if I was melting, seriously felt like I was going to fall to the ground and splash everywhere lol. Half way through I stopped at our house real quick to grab a towel to run with because the sweat was making it hard to see, it's like getting salt in your eyes so the towel was handy to wipe the sweat off my face and it also server a second purpose since I had it wrapped around my neck, the back of my neck usually burns if I'm in that kind of heat for to long so it was good to keep it protected.

You're bananas to run in that heat! But I see that as an accomplishment in that heat (I ran about 5 miles with the temperature at 99 once) Good thing you got that towel (I didn't) =/

vizwiz123 : I also had 32 ounces of Powerade to back me up lol, went through it all though within that 4 miles.

08-19-10: 4 Miles on Hilly Road. I only set out to do 4 miles today since my wife and I had plans and I didn't have much time to run anyway.

08-24-10: 2 x 2 Miles on Hilly Road. Been biking a lot lately so that used up most of my energy.

Holy crap dude, sounds awesome! I suck at running, and I'll probably never be any good, so this is amazing stuff to me. =D

But I do have one question: When I saw your first post had 2700+ words, I wondered, "Considering he's the owner, and there's that many words, how much Viz did he make?!" ...If you don't mind my asking.

Robert7 : Well the highest post multiplier is 3. Also that post didn't originally have that many words, I've been just editing and adding to it each week.

8 Miles on Hilly Road. Some reason I can't get above 8 miles on this road, either fatige really kicks in or my joints and muscles are just far to sore to keep going (though this is a really tough road, as I said, it's a lot of steep hills and it's about 80-90% hills). I'm happy with 8 miles and my toes didn't blister, I think putting Vaseline on my toes has solved that problem. It'll probably be a while before I go running again since my daughter will be born before I'm ready to go running again.

09-12-10: 6 Miles on Hilly Road! I only set out to do 6 miles since I wouldn't have time to do more with the Packer game and it's a good thing that I didn't do any more than 6 miles because my wife went into labor shortly afterward and we ended up going to the hospital a few hours after I got back (and the fatigue and soreness really affected the experience).

I do XC and it is hard. The most I have ever run is 10 miles no stopping. But I walk alot when I'm supposed to run.