i’d been off my game lately. The fall always turns my life upside down as school gets into gear. between new courses i’m enrolled in and new courses i teach, it’s difficult to nail down a steady routine. but it’s coming back in order now..
30minutes, down south st to robie, robie to tower, tower into the Point Pleasant, lots and lots and lots of hills, south park street to home.
This morning I ran the Halifax Citadel 1.1km loop that I charted out on the GMaps Pedometer earlier in the week. According to the website, the road that rings the Citadel is about 1.1km, so 9 loops would make almost 10km . Although I started tracking my run before I got to the hill, the Nike+ chip seems to confirm the GMap reading. Go Nike+ calibration.
I don’t normally run up on the Citadel. There are too many tourists who make the walk up there, or too many tour bus that drive the tourists up there, all to see the allegedly spectacular view of the harbour. In my opinion, all one sees is the tops of the office buildings in downtown Halifax, but I guess I’m not one to judge (we’ll leave that to the tourists and their wallets). I prefer, rather, to run in Point Pleasant Park , which offers dirt and clay trails, and not nearly as many slow-bodied walkers pointing out every monument. Of course, there are more people on bikes and more people with dogs, but the dogs are generally on the leash and friendly, and the cyclists are generally respectful of other people on the trails.
Given the fact that I don’t spend much time up on the Citadel, I had forgotten just how windy and rolly-polly the road is up there. The loop is incredibly "not-flat", and there is a serious wind on the harbour-side of the fortress. I had expected to shave some seconds off my current and typical Point Pleasant 10k times (around 55-56mins), but instead came in at my current pace, finishing off at 55:50 (a 5:34/km pace). I was a little disappointed with this, but given the amount of asphalt, wind, and hills, I shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s not at all too different up there than from what I normally run, except for that fact that I’m definitely on a loop, so boredom sets in fast.
All in all, the Citadel loop does make for a good run, if one doesn’t map asphalt and the aforementioned boredom. I was thinking of tracking myself for the Nike+ 10k up there, but now I think I’ll just stick to the trails of Point Pleasant, where I’m more comfortable. I’ve got nothing seriously against the Citadel; it’s just that this run this morning reminded me of all the reasons why I prefer the park (no asphalt, more trails, more trees).
(The citadel is probably a better place for one to get their stairs-training out of the way by taking to the steps from Brunswick St to the gate.)
For what its worth, my best 10k ever was clocked around 51:30 or so, but that was on a flat-as-can-be 2km loop in the California desert at about 20 degrees Celsius (it was early in the morning), many years ago. I’m not in the shape I once was, and I don’t think I could meet those times here in hilly Halifax unless I wanted to step up from rec-runner to competitive runner again. I’m currently running a 55/56min 10k on hills in Hali; I’d like to see 52 mins again, but I’d be satisfied if I hit 53.
Run Conditions: Early morning, 20 degrees C, Sunny, very windy, dry.
Notes: I have no clue why I hit a wall at 7km. it was psychological more than anything else.
I generally don’t run the road that rings the Halifax Citadel. It’s a loop, it’s asphalt, and it’s boring. If I do make a run for the giant mound in the middle of town, then I normally run up the 11 or 12 sets of steps that begin on Brunswick St, pass the clock tower, and end almost at the gate of the fort.
I was playing with the Gmaps Pedometer this afternoon, though, trying to find a steady, flat 10k somewhere in town so I can take part in the Nike+ Human Race 10k next week. After toying around with a couple different areas (Point Pleasant, the Bridge, Oxford St, etc), I finally settled on the Citadel after all. It turns out that the Citadel’s main loop is approximately 1.1km. This means (time to flex your grade 6 math skills) that 9 laps of the road will equal roughly 9.9km. Check it out at the link below.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2201947
rock.
Of course, Google maps can’t be as accurate as the wheel, but it comes damn close for the sake of this run on Sunday (the ipod will track the distance for registrants) and future simple training. If ever you’re going to pace yourself up there, however, I’d advise putting your start/finish in a straightaway as opposed to a corner, just for the sake of the vehicular (i.e. tour bus) traffic. I chose to start tracking at this particular corner simply because it’s closest to my current residence.
i’m starting to feel the burn from the 15km run from earlier today. while i was quickly stretching out my calfs, i started to think of all the fiends i ran into this morning. having run 15 km in a park whose outside loop is barely 3km, i literally ran by the same people several times. the dog-walkers were all-in-all alright, as were the baby-walkers and the grannies. i also really digged on the grandpas who were out there doing a weekend power walk. some of them waved to me, others looked in another directions, perhaps thinking that their activity pales in comparison to mine. i don’t buy that, though. hey dude, whatever works to keep you going, whether you’re 18 or 80.
i do have some issues with the early twenty-something Ultra-Cool Athletes who were doing 50-metre sprints on the grass near the soldier’s memorial. Although they were nice enough to eventually move off of the shared-use trail, they still put quite a show on by strutting their stuff in front of all the park-walkers, joggers and runners. At one point, I took a quite break to stretch our a kink in my back and noticed that they were timing their starts not just to their watches, but to the people jogging by. Eff that. If some one is a competitive athlete or runner or enthusiast, they’ve got no right to put their noses up when non-track-stars come running or jogging by. Their comparison of their own bodies and times against the weekend rec-runner is hardly a yard-stick to go by, yet those asshats were sure to make it known just how damn fast and cool they were compared to anyone going by - even old grandpa with the walking sticks!
i don’t think these guys were track people. Most runners aren’t asshats - especially the competitive ones. i think they must have been part of a team sport, and for whatever reason had decided to show off at the Park as opposed to the SMU track or the Dal field.
Idiots.
It’s been a while since I timed myself with the nike chip. work has kept me on my toes as of late, so I haven’t got out much for a formal run, either. add to the fact that it was already 27 degrees by the time i hit the trails around 9Am, and it made for a bit of a difficult run. i was a little surprised then, to see my time come in at just under 1:30. The last km was especially difficult - i definitely was working against my body and mind to make it down the home stretch (as evidenced by the nike+ chart below..)
Weather - hot but not humid.
hills - yes, lots of them today.
10km in Point Pleasant Park today. I stuck mostly to the perimeter by running two laps, both of which included Tower Hill Road (sometimes known as “Hill of Butt Death”, apparently). The second time on that hill really killed my pace, as evidenced in the chart below.
When I train on Hills, I head to PP and do repetitions on Tower Hill - anywhere between 6 and 10. Right now, though, I’m trying to get back into form and improve my speedwork. I don’t run as much as I used to. This is partly because Life became real hectic and stressful last winter, but mostly because I became bored with the entire running drill. I’ve always run for distance. Not that I’m some sort of distance runner, but my goals have always been length traveled as opposed to the speed in which I travel it.
So, for the past while I’ve decided to work on my speed, and see if that can motivate me to keep going. This means I’ve been trying to keep to the perimeter of the park and its gentle slopes since I’m now working on short distances at x pace instead of just longer and longest distances. Anyway, today Paula Radcliffe told me I accomplished a new personal best on the 10k that I ran, which I knew to be a whole lot of bullocks. I’ve been aiming to run under 55mins (i.e. under a 5:30min/km pace) again, but I have been stuck around the 57minute mark. My personal Nike+ best is sub-52 (51:50, thereabouts), but that time is stored on the Nike+ server as opposed to the iPod, since a catastrophic ipod and mac crash last December. Anyway, since I’m aiming to get back to sub55, and eventually to sub52, I’ll take Paula’s congratulations any day, but it still feels a little foolish, if not inauthentic.
so i’m thinking of doing the run-blog thing. again. here it is.
consider it an outlay from the nike+ system. i like that nike+ lets its users show off all their great stats to the world. look at them, littering this page. oh so pretty.
i didn’t use the nike+ much in the past year. i was flying a lot, and had a hard time keeping the transponder either on or off, or off and on (depending on whether or not I was 32000 ft in the air). then one day, i gave it one more shot, and low and behold, it’s back. yay.
i notice my stats are well off from my former form of about a year ago. doing grad work saw my average 5:30pace fall to about 5:40. i’ll aim to rectify that.
i’m a little unsure if i’ll keep this blog going, because rarely does anyone ever keep a blog going. also, i’m not sure if i’m feeling the nike+ love anymore. for $40 CDN, it does wonders at keeping your pace together. but its inability to track changes in elevation skews my stats, big time. Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a really, really, hilly town, so often a big drop in one’s Nike+ pace doesn’t necessarily mean one has become winded; it could just mean that the runner has turned a corner and found a 50-foot hill that was there three minutes ago. i fret and fret and think that i may have to go GPS one day after all.
the biggest thing Nike+ has going for it though, is its community. I don’t know if Garmin or Timex offers such a Web 2.0 networking facility with their GPS products. I would miss that part of Nike+. Ideally, Nike+ will get back into the GPS game and integrate it into their system. That’ll be the day, etc etc.
monday morning. get the weekend toxins (books, work, books, tv) out of the system.
PP Park;Hali. Took to the hills. I made a point to work hard at the end of the first 5km, but that point found me at a start of a large climb near black rock beach over the cusp of the hill, so it took a while to right myself after that.
A sudden drop at the end of the timing only because I had a hard time finding the “pause” button on the ipod through the armband’s fabric.
test. a recent run.