i am sore and tired.

and as soon as i blog, it's to bed with me.

today's workout was hard. no lie. basically we had to spend twice as much time at level e3 (e=effort) as e2. e2 is the effort we usually expend during our long saturday and normal runs during the week. the most challenging part about this is...finding e3. it's about effort, not speed, says ramon, and we all nod yes, oh yes, we understand.

and then we get out there and go too damn fast.

demps is a little faster than us, and so after the warm up (which i'll tell you about), char and i were on our own. 4 light poles at e3 and 2 at e2. i think the first two or three times we were at e4 or 5. the trick was to be breathing more deeply and longer breaths, but we weren't supposed to be huffing and puffing. it is a hard balance to find - how much energy to push it but not over do it and also to maintain your pacing for your two different levels.

we ran back and forth between cleopatra's needle (roughly at 81st) and the stop light at 94th street or so. drills. i don't think i've ever done anything like it before, and after i got the hang of it, i was feeling pretty okay. we think (because we weren't exactly keeping track) we ran about 6 and 1/2 lengths, each length was .7 miles, and so...4.55 miles. not so bad. i think i'm going to ache tomorrow, but i'm going to pop a few advil just in case.

the cool thing we did was measure how many strides we take per minute and then how many breaths. the point is that an efficient marathon runner takes between 2.5 and 3 (maybe 3+, i can't remember) strides per breath. i may have miss counted, but i took 162 strides per minute, and 42 breaths. that is 3.8 strides per breath. we're going to get the analysis for all of this probably tomorrow, but i'm happy i'm not that far out of the zone.

who knew running could be so complicated?

tomorrow an easy run in the morning, probably the same friday or yoga...and then...saturday is race day!

today's mileage: 4.55
total mileage: 56.34