Date: 12/24/21
Training Day: 19
Miles: 2 (treadmill)
Shoes: Xero HFS

How It Felt: I felt slow and out of shape, but dn did it feel good to run again!

Commentary: I accidentally set my workday alarm for 5am instead of my weekend alarm, so I got up a half an hour later than I wanted. Not the end of the world. I was all sorts of excited as I dressed in my workout clothes because I was about to hop on my shiny, new treadmill!

I chose an iFit run just to see how it went. The workout I picked looked relatively easy workout as far as incline. As soon as I hit start a leaderboard popped up that I found worthless and distracting. It took me until halfway through the run to figure out how to get rid of it.

There was another interesting popup though. It’s called ActivePulse™, and uses your heart rate to automatically adjust your pace and incline to keep you in the appropriate heart rate zone.

After the warmup, the pace and incline ramped up, and I knew it was too much for me. As I was reaching to adjust the speed, ActivePulse told me my heart rate was too high and it was adjusting the speed. Super fucking nifty if you ask me!

I ran, well, more like jogged, comfortably for the rest of the workout. Holy hell was I slow! I could have fast walked at the pace I was jogging. But instead of getting down about my loss of running fitness, I reminded myself that I have over six months to prepare for my A race.

After my run I loaded up my car and hit the road for my dad’s. Along the way I hit some winter weather. At one point the fastest I could go was about 40 mph. But once I got past Elko the sun came out, and I was able to cruise.

The weather and roads stayed nice until Susanville, CA. Then the snow started coming down. Right before turning on to the highway that goes to Dad’s I had to stop and put on chains because the Caltrans sign said so.

Even though the warning said not to go over 30 mph with the chains on, I averaged 40 mph. After about an hour there was barely any snow on the ground. The rattling and vibration of the chains started driving me crazy, so I pulled over and took them off.

I made the rest of the way without chains, driving slow and carefully. Now I’m whooped! It’s three hours past my bedtime, and I was on the road for 16 hours. And I need to get some rest so I can help shovel all the snow that’s supposed to fall tonight.

Training Journal exercise fitness ifit journal running snow trail running training treadmill winter driving