Damn you! Little bacteria thingies!

It's one week before my big race and I got an infection. Ugh! After the week and a half of rain which completely screwed up my training, this really came at a bad time. I try to look at it on the bright side - at least it didn't happen on my race week. Fortunately it's one of those that clear up quickly so I should still be able to squeeze in one long run and a couple of short runs. I'm suppose to taper anyway so maybe it's good that it happened at this time as oppose to earlier in the training.

Since I won't be able to enjoy the feeling of running the trails, I thought I'll relive some of the ones I had before. Last Saturday I did my longest run so far - 12 miles. It wasn't as good as I had hoped. At around mile 4 I got a really nasty side stitch which wouldn't ease no matter what I did. I ended up having to stop at half-way point for a few minutes before I could continue. This ate into my time which came out to 12-mpm. My goal for the Half is 11:30-mpm and had been able to do it in my long runs. Physically I feel very much ready to run the race; the only thing that could cause a problem seems to be this side stitch that I get frequently.

Here is how the run was captured by my Garmin 405: Los Gatos Trail Long Run. I've been wanting to write a review of the watch, which I got as an early Christmas present last year. Turned out the part I like the most is not the watch itself but the Garmin Connect website used to display the stats. It's available for other Garmin products as well so I can't really attribute it as a feature of 405. I like how it breaks up the runs into splits so that I can tell how I did at particular points of the run. In this case it's pretty clear that I started fast but gentle in order to save my strength  (I usually run a 10:00 to 10:30-mpm for short runs). As the miles piled up I slowed down. At mile 6 was where I stopped to nurse my side stitch. Then the last few miles was when I really had to fight my fatigue.

But my most favorite feature of all is the 'Player' which plays back the entire run on the map and the graph showing the pace and elevation. As a former software developer I can see that this is not a hard feature to implement, but the fact that they thought of it and implemented it just made me so happy! Click on the 'Player' button on the top-right of the screen to see the page.

The Los Gatos trail is probably not the best trail to showcase the website, as it's relatively flat so unless something annoying occurs, like a side stitch, the pace tends to be pretty even. Stanford Dish on the other hand is a great trail to show the change in elevation and hence the change in pace. The long uphill starting at mile 2 is the most challenging. It took me several times before I was able to run all the way up without stopping. The last time I ran it was 3 weeks ago, so I'd like to think that I'll do much better now. :-)

Stanford Dish Run

Once I'm over the hills I'm rewarded with a great view of the Bay Area, which probably slowed me down rather than sped me up. The last bit of the trail is steep downhill, which is actually kind of hard on the knees, but it helped to make up for the slow pace earlier in the run.

Ahhh....reliving these runs made me feel better. But I know something that's even better - shopping for running clothes! See you at Sports Basement!