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Not only is today my daughter Sara’s birthday, but it is also the birthday of my dear friend Nathan (@inthewright). Today Nathan and I did a short, but enjoyable trail run on the Blue, Orange, and Yellow trails in Edwin Warner Park.
My scheduled called for 40-minutes easy, so I decided that would be perfect for a nice little jaunt on the trails. Overall the weather was much better than yesterday’s sauna, with temps around 60 degrees and overcast skies.
As we started off on the flat part of the blue trail, we came across a very small, vividly blue bird that hopped down the trail in front of us for a little bit. I made a comment about the color of the bird and Nathan responded with something like “Based upon my research of looking at the hastily crafted bird chart on the back of the bathroom stall in the Nature Center, I would say that is an Indigo Bunting.” I knew exactly what “document” he was talking about and (1) found this funny (2) was amazed that he could remember obscure bird names simply from looking at a chart for a couple of minutes.
Anyway, the Blue trail has one challenging climb (see elevation chart above), but was otherwise perfect for a nice recovery run. My legs felt very good this morning, even on the big climb. This was nice after the tempo effort yesterday and P90X Legs and Back with Olivia last night. Our final total was just under 4-miles at 10:53 average pace. Great way to start the day.
Beast Mode….ON! ….And Happy Birthday Nathan!
Short article on Competitor.com regarding the importance of wearing an ID band while running. The article makes mention of my wife Olivia and I, along with our daughter Kate.
Two years ago Kate was running the final mile of her third kid’s marathon, and first by herself. She did a great job in the race, but unfortunately when we went to the pickup area after the finish line, she was nowhere to be found. After 30+ minutes of searching, my wife’s finally received a call from a race volunteer who had our daughter.
Before the race I had gone to RoadID.com and purchased an ID for Kate’s running shoe. I had been running with one for a while, and wanted to make sure Kate had one for her first solo race. My wife and I had both told her that if anything happened to her and someone asked how to contact her mommy or daddy to just tell them it was on her shoe. This is exactly what happened with the race volunteer and we were successfully reunited with Kate.
After this event we sent a short note to RoadID telling them the story, and they quickly asked if we would be willing to be part of their testimonial page on their web site. We worked with their staff to write a short recap of the events and sent them a picture from after the race. Since we were willing to do the testimonial, we now get free RoadID products for life, which is nice because they are vital for anyone who is a runner, biker, etc. or for kids in almost any situation.
Fast forward two years and we were again contacted by RoadID who asked for permission for Competitor.com to use our story in an article they were doing on running ID bands. Though the mention is brief, it is included in the link above.
Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: The Micah True Story (New York Times) by Barry Bearak
Wow….what an incredible article about the life and death of Micah True (a.k.a. Caballo Blanco) from the New York Times. For anyone who has read Born to Run, this is an absolute MUST READ. It contains lots of details on his life that were not in the book, lots of information on the search and rescue attempt in the Gila Wilderness, and some insight into the relationship between Caballo and characters from the book like Barefoot Ted and the author Christopher McDougall.
I think it would also be very interesting for anyone else who heard about the death of Caballo, but didn’t understand his background.
It’s long, but worth the read.
After two weeks of easy training runs it was nice to get back to a little tempo work this morning. My schedule called for 70-minutes total running, which included a 20-minute warmup, 30-minutes at 7:15 pace, and a 20-minute cool down. The temperatures this morning were in the high 60s, which was fairly nice, but the humidity was somewhat stifling.
Nathan and I met at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center and completed our 20-minute warmup on the Harpeth River Greenway and through the park at around an 8:30 average. For the tempo portion we ran 15-minutes out and back on the greenway, but didn’t stay together because we were running at a slightly different goal pace.
Everything felt really good throughout this section, and the only thing I had to fight was the urge to run faster than 7:15. The humidity felt uncomfortable but did not seem to have much effect on my legs or breathing. I completed just over 4-miles and nailed the 7:15 average. Nathan also had a good tempo effort with a 7:17 average pace.
After grabbing a quick drink, we finished with a 20-minute cooldown on the greenway and my legs still felt good all the way to the end. Our final total was 9.2-miles completed at just under 8:00-min pace with warmup and cool down.
Beast Mode…ON!
Friday
After a pretty hard track workout last night I was surprised at how good I felt on the run this morning. The schedule called for 50 minutes at easy pace, and I ran in my Saucony Hattoris through the streets of Bellevue with Nathan and Paxton. We kept the pace very chill with the first 3 miles in the low 9:00s, and the final 2.5 miles in the high 8:00s.
Even with the easy run, the humidity was high enough that I was in a full sweat by the end of the first mile. We mixed the route up a bit with a loop around the mostly empty Bellevue Center Mall. Overall another good run with the Bellevue Trio.
Saturday
Today’s group run was through the streets of Belle Meade and incorporated the infamous “Zig Zag” route introduced to us by Edward. Note the “Zig Zag” pattern during miles 2 through 4 in the map below…
We started at Bread and Company on Hwy 100 and I was a bit unsure how many total miles the planned route would include. My schedule called for 12 to 14 miles at an easy pace, and I was hoping to not have to run extra at the end.
The entire group ran together for the first 7 miles, and kept the pace very easy (9:40s to 8:30s). After 7-miles some who only wanted 10-miles total headed back to Bread and Company where we started. The rest of us kept going down Tyne Boulevard to add a few extra miles. After the 8th mile I decided to pick up the pace a little bit and ended up running most of the rest of the route by myself.
For the next 3-miles I dropped the pace a little below 8:00, and then decided to back off a bit for the final two as a cool down (8:20s). Even though it was fairly warm throughout, I felt really good during the run, and especially during the final 5-miles. Total for today was 13.1-miles at 8:41 average pace.
Beast Mode…ON!
Tonight’s track workout with the JSRC was tough, but it was a good kind of tough. Part of the challenge was the heat which was still in the low 80s at 6pm. The other was short recoveries. Those short recoveries made it hard to maintain effort throughout the intervals.
Also, coming into the workout my legs were a bit fatigued from P90X Legs and Back on Monday and running trails yesterday, but I was able to loosen them up pretty good during a 2.5-mile warmup.
Here is a breakdown of the workout…
- Warmup + 6 x 100m stride outs
- 800m f (300m recovery)
- 400m f (1-min recovery)
- 800m f (400m recovery)
- 1200m Straights and Curves (1-min recovery)
- 600m f (200m recovery)
- 300m f (1-min recovery)
- 600m f (cool down)
With warmup and cool down my total was 7.2 miles completed. By far the toughest part for me was going from 1200m straights and curves directly into a 600m with only a 1-min static recovery. However, I was able to maintain fairly consistent splits all the way to end, and am pretty happy with my overall pacing.
Just like last week, I ran this entire workout with Nathan McCall who has made incredible progress since joining our club last fall. Unlike me (adult onset runner), Nathan was a 4-year collegiate runner at Appalachian State, so I’m expecting that pretty soon he will be lapping me during the workouts 🙂 …In the meantime it has been great to have someone else running at my same pace the last two weeks.
Beast Mode…ON!
Today I returned to the trails for the first time since running in southern Honduras on our mission trip. It was a nice change of pace from all of my recent road running and I hope to get back into a normal routine of incorporating trails at least once per week.
My schedule called for 50-minutes easy and 4 x 100m stride outs. Of the three main trails in Percy and Edwin Warner Parks, only the red is long enough to occupy 50 minutes since it is 4.5 miles. It would take two laps on either the white or the blue trails because they are only 2.5 miles each.
My legs were really sore heading into this run from doing P90X Legs and Back on Monday night for the first time in two weeks. Overall it didn’t have a big impact on the effort, but was something I could feel for the first half of the run. For the run I kept the pace very conservative with with a steady progression from a first mile of 12:23 to a final mile of 10:27. The red trail has a total elevation gain of almost 1,200 ft in only 4.5 miles, so needless to say this is a challenging route. However, I felt pretty good throughout, even on the tough climbs, and really enjoyed being back on the trails in the beautiful Percy Warner Park.
At the end I completed the 4 x 100m stride outs on the main drive near the trail head. It felt weird to run strides in trail shoes, but I was still able to crank them out at a 6:35 average pace.
Beast Mode…ON!
Guinness Book of World Records recognizes surfer Garrett McNamara of Haleiwa, Hawaii for riding a 78-foot wave off the coast of Portugal in November 2011. I certainly don’t know the first thing about surfing, but this video just looks sick. I can’t imagine even being in the water with a wave that big much less trying to navigate a surfboard though it. Must Watch!
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Nathan and I had been talking recently about shaking up our normal running routes, so today we just kind of made it up as we went along through the streets of Belle Meade. My schedule called for 65 to 75 minutes at easy pace, and we started off with a first mile in the 9:30s. My legs felt a little tired at the start after doing P90X Legs and Back last night with Olivia, but they felt better with every mile, and felt really good at the end.
Our pace steadily increased throughout the run and landed in the 8:20s and 8:30s for the final 4.5-miles of our 8.5-mile total. It was fun to just make random turns down unfamiliar roads to see where they would lead. This strategy brought us to one stretch where it felt like we were going uphill for a LONG way, but overall was very enjoyable. The only downside to this ad-lib route was that we reached the 75-minute mark with about a half a mile to go back to our cars.
Not wanting to break my schedule from John, I decided to walk the rest of the way back to my car, and encouraged Nathan to keep running if he wanted. However, he also decided to walk and we both enjoyed a nice cool down stroll on Belle Mead Boulevard that felt pretty nice. Great way to start off a day.
Beast Mode…ON!
Sammy Wanjiru’s death still a mystery by Shaun Assael – ESPN The Magazine
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the tragic death of Kenyan Sammy Wanjiru, at the age of 24, who was quite possibly on his way to becoming the greatest marathoner of all time. In his very short career Sammy was an Olympic Marathon gold medalist (2008), two-time winner of the Chicago Marathon (2009, 2010), winner of the London Marathon (2009) and twice the half marathon world record holder (59:16-2005, 58:33-2007).
His death really struck me last year especially because he was the winner of the 2009 Bank of America Chicago Marathon, which was my first completed marathon. During that race he ran the fastest marathon ever on U.S. soil (at the time).
The article linked above is by Shaun Assael with ESPN The Magazine, and is a compelling read regarding his life and the strange, sad, and tragic circumstances of his death.
Let’s just say that this morning’s run was a little more interesting than we had planned.
The schedule called for 50 minutes easy with 4 x 100m stride outs at the end. Nathan and I met at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center and did most of the run through the park and on the Harpeth River Greenway. As expected my legs felt a little creaky at the beginning after the hilly run through Percy Warner on Saturday. This steadily improved throughout the run, though our splits were pretty chill from start to finish. It was nice to enjoy a very easy recovery run until….
On our way back to the cars it became apparent that we would be about 5-minutes short of our 50-minute goal, so Nathan suggested we cross Hwy 100 and run a few minutes on Harpeth Bend road before returning to the park. When we came to Hwy 100, the traffic was so thick it appeared as though it would take a while to cross. As an alternate plan, Nathan suggested that we run through the Ensworth High School campus which is next door to Edwin Warner Park.
For those of you outside of Nashville, Ensworth represents the pinnacle of elitism with an annual tuition that is more than many private colleges. As a matter of fact it actually looks much more like a college campus than a secondary school. When we started running through the entrance I joked that we would probably be setting off motion and heat sensors and Nathan fired back that there were probably snipers watching us.
I suggested that we follow the lower drive which is well away from the main buildings so as not to look suspicious. As we were running through there I noticed a small parking lot and said “I wonder who they make park all the way down here…it must be the house elves (reference to Harry Potter).”
Just as we passed through the parking lot we came to their athletic fields and decided to turn back for the park. Right after turning we saw that a Hummer H3 was headed our direction. It quickly stopped and a security guard jumped out (why does a high school need Hummers for their security guards?). He asked if we attended school there (I’m 37 ???). When we said “no” he said that we were trespassing on private property and had been reported to security by someone at the school. What was surprising to me was that we had only been on that lower road for about 2 minutes.
He then said that our being on campus represented a “liability issue” and we needed to leave immediately. I told him that we were simply cutting through on a run and would head back to where we came from. He told us that going back that way would take too long and we needed to go past the athletic fields out onto Hwy 100 (really pleasant guy). Though I didn’t want to go onto Hwy 100, we obliged and headed back to the park along the highway.
As we passed back by the entrance to Ensworth next to the park, the Hummer H3 was parked right by the entrance with the security guard enjoying a smoke. I assume he wanted to doubly make sure we did not come back onto the school property. I waved at him as we passed by back into the park.
After the 50 minutes was completed we did 4 x 100m stride outs on the greenway back to our cars. Our average pace for the 50 minutes was just over 9:00 per mile, and the average pace for the strides was 5:58. Other than our little adventure at Ensworth, it was a pretty enjoyable run.
Beast Mode…ON!
By far the most common way we hear it pronounced is either “Aggie” or “UhGee” as both mentioned below. Also, when I was in high school they engraved my name on the inside of my class ring as “Agree” just like Nikky said.
Congrats to everyone who had it right, and thanks for reading!!
Love the Agagee name 🙂
Not Agree? People mispronounce my last name all the time. Guerney, Gernsey….crazy.
I was saying UhGee in my head. Agagee is funny. 🙂
sweet, I got it right!
I was right:)
I had the vowels right, but had been using a hard “g” in my head.
Haha… okay, I’ve been pronouncing your name wrong this whole time. Well, I learned something new today!
Also, I’d been pronouncing it “aggie.” So totally wrong. 🙂