Category Archives: Sports

2026-04-16 Running check-in

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Things have been pretty good. Had my highest volume week ever (35 miles), then the following week was a half marathon race which went great – beat my target of 1:50 with a 1:48:05 chip time. The last two miles or so of that course were brutal; you run past the finish line, up a hill, down a hill, up a hill, down a hill, up a hill, down a hill, and then sprint to end. My buddy and I ran the whole thing together until I tried to break away on the last downhill. It was going according to plan until he sprints past me about 10 feet from the finish! All in good fun.


Now I’m ramping into peak phase after that race, and kind of looking forward to it in a “rising to meet a challenge” kind of way. So far the long runs have been longer, and the mid-week runs have been more sprint / interval focused. We’ll see if I can continue to whittle down Strava’s marathon finish time prediction – steadily approaching the 4 hour mark over the last few weeks. Much less optimistic than Garmin’s prediction of 3:40.

2026-03-09 Running Check-in

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Today was a good day. I got to drive the RS, and I got to run outside! To be fair, not driving the RS in the winter and spending the last ~3 months exclusively on treadmills were limitations of my own making, but I’ll take some wins when I can get them. My knees have been better for the last two weeks too, so I’ve been living large.

For once in my life, I was excited to go for a run. Part of it was so that I could get a fresh set of stats from Garmin – they require GPS to calculate your VO2 max, and they require VO2 stats to feed some other metrics like lactate thresholds, estimated max heart rate, training readiness, endurance score, etc. I do nothing with that information, but I like to have it – its the right level of gamifying my health stats to keep me hooked, and even during an interval run where I felt like I was struggling to maintain pace, I was delivered a fresh set of updated metrics that had improved across the board. I kind of expected this to happen, but its nice to have a digital estimate that confirms that I have actually been improving whilst spending hours staring myself down in a gym mirror. And that bit is the main reason I was so stoked to run today – it wasn’t on a treadmill.

Keeping pace is obviously taken car of for you by the treadmill so I had to keep reminding myself to actually push myself forward, but I did find that my familiar paces (~9:00/mi and ~7:00/mi today) still had some good muscle memory to them that carried over onto streets and sidewalks. Time really flies when you’re focused on breathing and trying to avoid rolling your ankle jumping from muddy grass to lingering ice to try and avoid stepping into a deep puddle. Even when fairly frequently checking my watch to try and stay in the workout pace zones, this felt effortless compared to effectively being forced to watch a timer tick over seconds and minutes on a treadmill.

I was particularly happy to see that my performance condition (a metric Garmin invented to compare pace and heart rate against your VO2 max) remained positive for the entire workout, which is a first for me. Surely that’s tied to a stale VO2 max estimate and making me look better than I actually am, but like I said, I’ll take the wins where I can😁.