Monday June 23

I am in the midst of a heavy training block now. The calf injury, which plagued me the first half of the month, seems to be behind me now and I am running consistantly once again; putting in 37 miles in 6 runs last week. Most of it was a very easy pace. I had a great 12 mile run on Sunday…even though it was hot out, I managed a steady 7:33 pace at avg 151 HR, which is just a couple beats over my Maffetone pace. My PE felt lower than the HR indicated, it felt very comfortable and easy.

My bike mileage, which is typically very light (60-80 miles/wk)…is actually approaching a respectable level…I managed 140 miles last week with quite a bit of intensity. The highlight was a tough 4 hr + ride on Saturday, just shy of 70 miles…not very long, but it had 8500 ft of climbing. Again, I felt good despite the heat…my legs felt strong on the climbs. I’ve noticed a distinct change in my strength on long climbs during the last couple weeks…the hard intervals and big gear work I’m doing are paying off.

I’m looking forward to another big week…somewhere in the 150-160 range on the bike and 40-45 miles of running.

In other news, I’m a little bummed out – a couple good friends of mine (and riding buddies) are moving out of the area this week. We went out for some pizza and beers tonight for a little going-away party. I’m considering doing the Marine Corps Marathon this fall – that will give us a good excuse to go visit.

Stay tuned for some changes to the site…I am changing my blogging platform from WordPress.com to WordPress.org which will give me the flexibility to do some cool and different things with the site. I’m very much a novice when it comes to web design – but its a fun little project.

For you fellow tech geeks out there…check out this new web application called Evernote. It advertises itself as ‘your external brain’, essentially its a note-taking/web clipping app that syncs a desktop client, the web and a mobile device. In particular, the text recognition is pretty amazing, it will recognize handwritten text in a photo and make that text searchable. I’ve just started to play with it and its pretty cool. Check out the demo here.

That’s it for now…

~ by JP on June 23, 2008.