Saturday, September 16, 2017

Krispy Kreme Challenge - Training Run 2

Cross-posted to riseupandrunagain.blogspot.com.

As my husband's patients would say, "It's been a minute." Turns out training for a marathon, having a full-time job (especially one that is particularly busy at this time of year), studying for a standardized test, and trying to do regular life stuff (like drink water and eat real food) typically rank higher on the priority scale than training for the Krispy Kreme Challenge, but I'm still hanging in there, and some of the other running stuff I'm doing is helpful for KKC training.

Perhaps my most exciting development this week was that I went to a one mile time trial on Wednesday morning (more on Wednesday Morning Track another day) and ran my mile in 9:11. I am not sure I have ever run a mile that fast in my life; initially, I thought, "This is probably my fastest mile since those Presidential Physical Fitness Test runs in elementary school!" but I specifically remember my mom writing a note for me so I didn't have to do the mile in 6th grade. I really hadn't been feeling well, but considering the condition in which I run multiple miles now, I was in good enough shape to do the mile on that fateful day in 2000. I don't remember how I did on the mile in 5th grade. Nevertheless, I ran my fastest mile in a while on Wednesday, so that was cool. If I can get up to running five miles with 9:11 as my per-mile pace, I'll have a whopping fourteen minutes to eat my donuts during the Krispy Kreme Challenge.

Today, Tim and I met for our second KKC training run. (Lauren was missed!) I was up before the sun, taking my preventative Imodium and picking up donuts so we could start our run at 6:00 am. This time, we kicked up the mileage by one mile, and I doubled the donut intake to four donuts. Here's how we did according to my watch (which was a little more generous than Tim's was--he had us right at 6 miles):

1st run - ran 3.06 mi in 45:07 (14:45 pace)
Donut/transition: 6-8 minute (I need to start actually timing transition)
2nd run - ran 3.04 mi in 45:06 (14:50 pace)
Total time: 1:37-ish

Once more, nobody puked or died. I have to wonder if someone will eventually puke, though.

Training hard
Our overall pace dropped a bit today, but we were consistent across the miles, which is important. I think I'd prefer to run the miles evenly if I can, but I still also hope to be fast enough to have some time banked for the second half in case life happens on race day.

I'll be honest, doubling the donut intake from two to four was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. I went out and socialized on Friday night, including eating a pretty substantial Peruvian meal at 10:00 pm, so perhaps I was still a little full from that (though what I remember about the timeline of digestive process tells me that's probably not actually the case). Eating that last donut was not a piece of cake (it was a donut!), but I think I could have eaten up to six donuts and still run the second loop.

I'm slightly overwhelmed by the thought of eventually eating triple the amount of donuts that I ate today. Today, when I ate four donuts, I reflected upon lessons in economics class about diminishing returns. My professors used beer and Krystal burgers as their examples, but I think donuts are a similar case -- if this is how #4 feels, how will #9 feel? When those dark thoughts creep in, however, I remind myself of other training achievements that overwhelmed me and are now regular occurrences, like running six miles. I'm continually impressed by the things my body can do, and I fully trust in my ability to train up to eating a dozen donuts. (Did I really just write that sentence?)

Overall, training is going pretty well. I'm getting faster and eating more donuts. I haven't yet combined the faster pace with donut consumption, but it's still early. Today, I'm especially grateful for the support of friends in this training journey. Plus, who wants to binge on donuts alone?

Tim wonders why he agreed to this.