Continued effort

I have been continuing to trog through my weekly runs... Monday / Tuesday runs are the hardest since they are on my own. For example, I ran 3 1/2 miles this morning on the treadmill. Since school is now out, I got to sleep in a bit - and the gym was still crowded at 6 AM... Wednesday / Thursday runs have gotten better. While it is harder to run at night due to the summer heat, we've pushed the time back to 7 pm when it's a bit cooler. We ran 5+ each of the past two weeks on Wednesday. While it's a smaller group, it is definitely better than running on the treadmill solo.

On Saturday, we moved the run to an industrial park in the next county west of us. It is really close (< 3 miles from my house), but I'd never spent much time there other than just driving through. The park has a four lane divided highway that has almost no weekend traffic. There are many more bikes and runners than there are cars. It is quite rural and a very quiet place to run. I met Sara and Heidi, along with a group of others. Most that were there are in the half-marathon training program. Sara ran with a couple of other gals that she knew. Heidi had completed three miles before I arrived at 7, but then ran six miles with me. We had a great conversation - meaning that our pace was good. We just clicked through the miles with little effort.

I just ran across (pun intentional) an article from a runner's world blog. Since several of us have discussed this, I thought it was worth sharing. It discusses how to determine and change your running cadence which will decrease your chance of injury while increasing your speed -- a really good combination!

http://rodale.typepad.com/coachjenny/2007/05/run_faster_easi.html

Today, I checked my cadence at 6.1 MPH - 182 (91 left steps in 1 minute)... now to go back and read what that means! I'll try to do the same tomorrow when we run outside.