August 18 - August 31

Monday - OFF

Tuesday - 5.09 miles - 42:34
Nice easy 5-er down to NBP and back.

Wednesday - 6.01 miles - 47:04
3 out and 3 back via B2B trail as a decent little progression run.  Finished with a 6:28 final mile.

Thursday - OFF
Planned on 5 or 6 today, but was pretty tired after the volunteer cleanup effort and banquet work.  Ate food and got a surprise birthday visit from Kifer.  Wasn't too hard to talk myself out of running.

Friday - 5.54 miles - 50:36
Swapped typical on/off days.  Felt pretty shitty this morning after staying up visiting until 0230.

Saturday - OFF
With Kifer in town and my schedule more or less being planned for me, I had to miss out on a scheduled 15 for today.  No big deal, but I would have loved to get in some trail time this week.  Sick of the typical road routes that I have been restricted to.

Sunday - OFF
Got home from Cleveland this morning after gambling all night with enough time to drop Kifer at the airport and get home to find my parents here 3 days early.  No run for me today.  No complaining either.


Monday - 8.25 miles - 1:06:29
Happy birthday to me.  Not enough time to get 33 birthday miles in, but 8.25 miles on 8/25/14 was good enough for me.  Like all of my morning runs, an out and back along the B2B trail.  Not a pure progression run, but I pushed harder than normal for a morning run to be sure to get to work on time.

Tuesday - 4.01 miles - 30:27
Fitbit went kaput last night, and along with it my wakeup alarm.  Only had enough time for a 30 minute run, so I pushed a bit harder than yesterday to get at least 4 miles in.

Wednesday - OFF

Thursday - 5.06 miles - 41:12
Another morning run so as not to miss time with my family in the evening.  Woke up on time today though, so no rush needed.  This was more or less a steady state type of run.  Slow first mile and then hovered at 8:00/mile with a 137 average heart rate. (Skewed a bit because of the spike at the beginning of the run)

Friday - OFF

Saturday - 10.14 miles - 1:27:56
Got out to the Poto section for the race next week.  Rather than parking at Silver Lake and doing the usual route, I found a pullout and parked my truck right near the race entrance to the trail.  Today's pace was meant to be tougher than normal, and much faster than race pace mainly to build some last bits of confidence about the race.  I ran every step today other than the one time that I encountered some runners on the trail.  I got through the section ( Turkey Head) and found that it is only about 6 miles in distance and rather than doing a second loop, I did a couple of passes on the upper section mixed with some uptempo stuff on the dirt roads leading to the trail entrance.  Felt excellent today.  That humidity though....

Sunday - 5.05 miles - 42:30
Easy 2 miles down to NBP and chose to sprint the hill up and down to try and break 2 minutes.  Fell short by 2 seconds.  To be fair, I did have to slow a bit on the down hill because it was wet and traction was shit.  I'll get it next time.  Cruised home and had a bit of a problem regulating my heart rate.  Feeling good now as I write this, so no biggie.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty decent overall.  I'm a little disappointed in the total mileage from last week, but ending this week with the strong run on Saturday was pretty good.  I'm excited for this race finally.  The weather looks to be decent, and with my training and knowledge of the trails, I am confident I can finish well.