Tuesday, 29 March 2005

Haven't been writing. My mom's been visiting, so I've been doing stuff with her.

I have been exercising. We've been walking a few miles each day. Mom and I lifted weights this morning. The weather finally got warm enough for me to want to run, so I ran yesterday and today--just 1.5 miles each day, but I wanted to be careful not to hurt myself, because we had a hike at Allerton planned for today. I'll ease back into running. I'll work up to 3-mile runs over the period of a couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure I can do 3 miles without hurting myself, I just want to be a bit gradual about it.

Last year I was running 3 miles several times a week, and doing one longer run each week. The long run varied in length, up to a 7 or 8 miles at its peak. Once I'm doing 3-mile runs several times a week, I'll start working up the distance of the long runs again. I want to work back up to where I was last year, but I don't think I'm going to try to surpass it. My focus for this year is going to be on the bicycling. There's a century (100 mile) ride in Kalamazoo in mid-July that I'd like to do. I'm still working on convincing Jackie to do it as well.

Training for a century isn't that hard. I'll bicycle to work as usual, once the weather gets good enough. The round trip is about 10 miles. In addition to around 4 days of commuting by bike a week, we'll do one long ride on the weekend, working up gradually toward doing a long ride of 65 or 75 miles around the end of June. I think as long as that long ride goes smoothly, Jackie will be willing to give the century ride a shot. Last year our longest ride was around 40 miles, I think. From there to 65 is an easy step.