My Odometer

Upcoming Races

March 7, 2010

ShamRock & Roll

Today was the first race of the year.  A nice out-and-back 5k through New Haven sponsored by WPLR.  There's certainly an eerie feeling when you start a race near a cemetery.  We started this one across the street from the historic Grove Street Cemetery, down by Yale's Woolsey Hall.  To make a long story short, I finished in 28:20 (my watch), which is at the very least, 10 seconds/mile slower than I had hoped to pace myself.  Still, it was much better than the Finally Spring 5k I started with last year.  Plus, the temperature was well above freezing this year, and it was all on pavement.


What else made this one better?  There were a LOT of people there that I knew.  Plenty of kids from school were running, which is helpful.  They were all much faster than I was.  Plus, there was one of the other coaches.  The course was pretty smooth, with one hill that was pretty long, but not a killer.  It was actually the shorter, steeper hill that sucked.  Running up that, and I hadn't regained my stride until I was already down the other hill.  However, the last quarter mile or so, I really had a nice extra gear that I haven't seen in over a year (marathon training killed what little speed I've had).


There wasn't much schwag from this event, but I got a decent St. Patrick's day tshirt, a MyoPlex shake at the finish, and a free beer and plenty of food inside of the World Famous Toad's Place.


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One of the nicer things I've found this week was suggested by Dave, the other coach who ran, and Brandt (who I'll bet will read this once it goes into Buzz)...Anyway, their suggestion was to start using DailyMile. Think Facebook meets your running journal.  For the past 4 or 5 years, I've been tracking my training on MapMyRun.com, which is a great site.  I had checked out DailyMile earlier this summer, and was not all that happy.  My biggest gripe had been that it's course mapper was not very accurate.  They seem to have fixed that, and I'm glad I made the switch.


The site is very user friendly, and creates a nice graph of your progress.  It also has a lot of great widgets (as you can see) to add to your blog or personal site.  Finally, it breaks down the work you've done into usable metrics-think HOW MANY DONUTS HAVE I BURNED? (see bottom of page).


Anyway, I'm already a big fan, and recommend the site to anyone.  As this blog shows, I like when people can keep tabs on my progress.  Not only does it have social networking capabilities, the site also posts to my Facebook account-providing another hundred-plus people who will know what I've run each day.  They may hate it, but the fear that they'll comment if I have too many off days will keep me running.

1 comments:

Jennifer March 9, 2010 at 11:31 AM  

I like how you can track your donuts! I am signing up for dailymile NOW.

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