BillstronBlog

This past Sunday (10/5/2008), I ran the Bridge To Bridge 12k race in San Francisco.  I clocked my finishing time at 1:05:18, but my official time is 1:06:10.  Overall, I finished 617 out of 2516.  In my age group (my first year in Male 30-39), I finished 185/433.  My official average pace was 8:53/mi.  You can check out all of the race results here.

I’m really happy about my race.  As you probably know, I’ve been training for speed the last few weeks.  While I’m not by any strech of the imagination, fast, I am faster than before.  I didn’t clock quite as fast a pace as I’d liked, but I believe it’s because my training got thrown all out of wack last week.  I was sick and basically took the week off.  Before the race on Sunday, my previous run was a 10 miler on the previous Sunday.  This is certainly not optimal training.  I’m going to continue my speed training, and hopefully see my pace increase further.  I’d really like to get down to 8min/mi over a 12k distance, but that might be a little too ambitious.

I really love the Bridge to Bridge race.  The organizers bill it as ‘America’s Most Beautiful Run’, and they are probably right.  The race starts at the foot of the bay bridge just in front of the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco.  It then basically follows the waterfront past the piers to the beach before it doubles back on itself at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge.  The finish line is in Presidio.  This year, in addition to the wonderful scenery,  the weather was perfect too — 65 and sunny.  This is even a good race for beginners because they run a 7k too.

The only downer about this year’s race was that I didn’t have my normal race partner — Scooter.  I’ve run it with him the two previous times, and I definitely missed him this year.  My friend Pete came out, but we split about a mile into the race.  Scooter and I pace each other perfectly.  Plus, he’s almost as big a dork as me, so we have plenty to talk about.  Maybe I’ll try to talk him into coming in next year for the race.

Next year I’m going to do it a little differently, though.  I’m going to run it with Molly.  That should be great fun for Molly and Poppa.

This time I’ve spent off with Molly and Krista have been the most wonderful couple of months of my life, but my healthy lifestyle really went to hell. Ever since the first pre-term labor episode in May, I’ve been living a slothful lifestyle. I’ve probably only totaled 30 miles of running since then, and I want to be running at least 50 miles a month (more like 75 or 100). After Molly was born, I got really really bad. Since I wasn’t working, I had a kind of vacation mentality which translated into too frequent overeating and evening libations.

The Olympics caused a sea change in my thinking though. Sitting there, on the couch with a beer, watching the best athletes in the world made me see my sloth in full view, and I’ve decided to “turn over a new leaf”, as Jason would say. True to my geek form, I’m going to do it with technology.

Last Wednesday (the 13th), I started running again, with a focus on speed training. I need a goal to my training because I get so bored with the same 3mi lap around Lake Merritt. For further motivation, I’m going to run the Bridge to Bridge 12k race on October 5. I’ve run this race a number of times, but this time I want to run it faster than ever.

So where does technology come it? I’ve been running with a Nike+ iPod Sport kit for nine months and absolutely love it. It comes with a little pod that attaches to my shoe and a dongle that plugs into the bottom of my iPod Nano. The pod transmits information to the dongle that allows for tracking of speed, distance, etc. The best part about the Sport Kit is that the run data is uploaded to Nike’s website where I can view and track my progress.

In order to publicly motivate myself, here is my public Nike+ page (link also in sidebar, at the top under Navigation), and I’ve placed a widget on the sidebar (———>) that displays my last five runs. So if you see that I’m slacking, let me hear about it. Also, if anyone else out there is running with a Sport Kit, send me a challenge.