Progress is Fun

Wait, that would mean I am enjoying this?! Training for anything that forces you to move your body is hard work, but I had another inspiring session this afternoon. Rain was in the forecast FINALLY and Billy and Jake were not home so I put on my new shoes, mp3 player, heart rate monitor, and GPS (lol, probably had more computers on me today than the first F-15 fighter jet that I worked on back in the day) and then Poochy and I took off for the hayfields.

We made pretty good time today. With the rain coming I sure wasn't poking along, but my course today was supposed to be in the moderate heart rate range, which would be 134 to 150 beats per minute today. I actually managed to do a pretty good job of keeping it in that range too. There were a couple of spikes - it started sprinkling when we were about a half mile from the house. Poochy and I started running a short cut across a flat piece of ground and then I remembered I had left the gate open at the top of the hill - so after that run and then hiking to the top of the hill I was working.

The part that was inspiring and put me in a good mood is that I covered 3.1 miles of hayfield trail in 53 minutes and had an average heart rate of 143 bpm or 80% of my max. Yes that means I could have worked harder, but this was Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning I am going to be working a lot harder.

Now some people might think that time was really nothing to be inspired by, but you can just come on out to my hayfields and we will compare your road times and average heart rate to what you can do out here. Unless you run hills all the time I expect that you will notice a difference.

My new Asics trail shoes are just as comfortable as my other Asics road shoes. The purpose of buying the trail shoes (top in the picture) was mostly for that dark part you see by the toe - that section is what keeps my foot from sliding sideways on the edges of the hills. They are also water resistant and have deeper treds to manage the rocks and sticks on the trail. The cushioning is pretty nice too. The shoes that I had been wearing have little to no cushion.

The only problem I have is that I need more dri-wicking socks.