The big 6 0

So, I know I said I wasn't going to pull this whole 20 day off in between posts thing anymore, but, well, I lied.  I'm currently residing at UNC Asheville, in lovely Asheville North Carolina.  I would say I'm back on the road for work, but that would imply I was ever off of it.  Anyways, I've been running a bit this week, and with my 89 minute long run this morning, I officially broke 60 miles for the first time in a while.  Like, a long while.  I've been lucky enough to do most of my running this week with Jason "8.0" Knight, Brian "Gov" McGovern and Kevin "No nickname yet" Starkes. Needless to say, we have been running a decent amount, by my standards, and I've been starting to feel it.  This week has been crazy, lots of work, lots of running, and lots of failing to sleep on dorm beds.  Freshman year?  Oh wait, I said lots of work, never mind.

Anyways, my new old job is pretty sweet.  I'm doing Gait analysis and Nike iD for High School runners.  Right now I'm going all over the east coast to different camps. In about 2 months i'll be visiting high schools and going to meets promoting NXN and just generally doing my thing. Sick.

Running has been going great.  The camps have been sweet, so far, and are really helping me get my run on.  I've lost 30ish pounds since February, so clearly I'm doing something right.  Most runs I keep the tempo around 6:45 pace, and I do about an hour a day, though some days, with the kids schedules, it differs.  Next week I even think I'm going to get on the track and do some 1k repeats at tempo pace.  Mostly because I'm not sure if I can do a tempo at tempo pace.  My best/worst run from this last week came when Gov took us on these trails at the North Carolina Arboretum.  We ran for about 67 minutes, and we were looping around when Gov goes "I think if we take this left it will take us back to the top of that last hill and we can coast down the last few miles.  It should be uphill right at the beginning, but then it will level off."  10 minutes of 10% incline later, I was totally redlining while watching the other guys pull away.  You know the scene in Titanic where Leo's body just sinks into the ocean?  It was like that, except more painful and tragic.  Moral of the story, I'm getting back in shape, but I have a long ways to go.  

On a related note, having a watch with an altimeter is sweet, unless you look at it in the middle of a run and realize you have climbed over 1000ft and that you are now high enough to where you should start noticing the effects of that height.  We were climbing one hill in particular and once I looked at my watch and saw how high we were, I actually started to feel worse, but not until I looked at it.  So now my brain is working against me too.  Great, first my body, now my mind.  Anyways, I'll try to keep updating my blog a little bit more often, maybe once or twice a week, but I make no promises.