Yep, Cold is the big thing at the moment.
I'm a cold guy. Well... I mean I'm more worried about the heat this summer and cold hasn't bothered me as much because more clothes tends to take care of the cold problem.
But...
Well, this current wave/winter where we seem to be averaging things like -6F at night and up to about 7F during the day and a wind chill about 20 degrees less than that...
Yeah, that's fine once or twice, but it seems to be happening for weeks now... Maybe not quite, but there have been far too many of those days/nights.
So I'm currently doing my best to energize myself and "embrace the suck" as they say. Cause even I am rather tired of this level of cold. Running does not sound like that much fun. But I will do my best to conquer my probably 7 miles this afternoon and I think I'll toss in 3 for tomorrow as I prepare for this transition from 10K to half marathon training where the training plans are going to start tapering down for 10K and just starting up for Half marathon.
Suck it up buttercup!
On the long run front, I did get my 10 miles in Sunday. Still walked a decent bit, but kept it to just over 13 minute miles which I'm not too disappointed with all things considered. It was around 6F and windy I believe.
I went for about 20 minutes and tried to get a drink from my Camelbak which I had previously tried and thought I had like half an hour before it was getting very frozen at those temps...
Nope. It was frozen solid. Well, the tube anyway. I was walking for about 15 minutes while I fiddled with it, pulling it apart, bending it, trying to break up the ice, etc. But to no avail. So I ended up disconnecting it from the pack and tucking it under my shirts against my chest and running for about 10 minutes which got it usable again.
As of yesterday I have now ordered the insulated tube. And the meter to tell how much I'm drinking.
I tried Clif Blocks this time which may have contributed to my water consumuption along with just trying to keep the tube from freezing, but apparently I cleared out the 2 liters at around the 7-8 mile mark, so the last couple blocks I washed down with a handful of snow.
This led to the most painful part of the journey. A serious need to pee! Walking wasn't TOO bad, but running was like my bladder bouncing with every step. Thankfully I managed to find a suitable spot at one point to empty things out. But this is going to be more of a concern as the miles and time go on... Need to get that figured out.
Took a different route this time as well, it looked like a decent 10 mile route. Eh... The first half-ish wasn't too bad, but then the road I would have not thought would be busy at all had a few vehicles and then the road I picked because it should be cleared more... Well, even on a Sunday afternoon there was a good bit of traffic(as opposed to my usual NONE). And it was nice and cold and slushy, so there wasn't a ton of great room on the shoulder, but thankfully only one vehicle managed to actually spray me with slush. But I'm thinking I may avoid that main road at least in bad conditions. Maybe when it's nicer out I can get some more shoulder room and think about it more. I'm having trouble deciding just where to run! I need to get over 12 miles before I can actually get enough to make it to the Finger Lakes Trail and get on there at all without driving to it. At that distance, I could run to work...
As for the Clif blocks, they seem fine. Basically gummy bears in a larger block form. For the cost, I think I'm going to just use real food but I figure I'll try out these things just to see how it works.
Other items on yesterday's Amazon gift card order besides the insulated tube/meter for the Camelbak....
Oh, I was contemplating a GPS watch as everyone seems to like those better than their phones for some reason. I admit, who doesn't like another piece of tech on their wrist, but they're not exactly cheap and my phone just seems like a better place to keep everything with my apps, etc. So I looked around. What I ended up with is that it sounds like my Pebble(watch that shows info from phone) should be semi-rugged and should show more info than the gps watches, and costs about the same if I do kill it. So I ordered a screen protector for it to hopefully avoid any big gashes and a "NATO STRAP" that I had never heard of, but it's basically a full bracelet/strap for your watch, so as with every strap I've been familiar with, if you caught it on something, you just need to provide enough force to break one of the pins in your watch and then the whole thing falls off your wrist. With this strap, you'd need to break the strap itself, or it's multi-faceted attachment, or BOTH of the pins on your watch.
And then since Incipio seems to be overly stupid with their announcement like 6 months ago of having a waterproof case for my Moto X and STILL having ZERO idea if/when it will actually be released... I got myself a $15 Kyocera Hydro phone that should be water resistant and worst case if I kill it, it's only $15. But it runs Android 4 so I should be able to hook up my Pebble and run my apps to log my more rugged races and then sync them once I get back to wifi. That's the hope anyway!
The Humdinger is March 1st which is just about a month away and while it doesn't look TOO bad, there is some mud/water/snow/ice slides at least so I'm not overly comfortable about taking my Moto X in just a ziplock and hoping that I don't smack it too hard if I land on it in a fall/slide or something. And the only generic cases I can find are rather huge-ish. Might be ok in my Camelbak, but not something I want to run with for the races I don't take the Camel like the Humdinger.
Next questions.... How to keep this phone attached to me... I have pockets, but I don't think I have any with zippers... Although that begs another question of just what I intend to wear to these "dirty" races... It sounds like you want good technical clothes, but that it's questionable if they will be clean again... Gonna need to figure that out soon. Wish there was a good location for cheap technical clothing!
Also need to see how long the battery will last in this Hydro to make sure it will handle the races while logging...
ANY-hoo... Here I was thinking I didn't have anything to say and now I've gone on for quite a while!
No comments:
Post a Comment