Workout: 3 mi. Easy

Time: 49:39

Temp: 49˚F

Please forgive me for resorting to a generic naming convention for these training updates, but this is only the third one, and I’m already realizing it’s going to get harder and harder to come up with a clever title every time I go run a few miles in the Yard. If an update covers something unique enough to rate a clever subtitle, I’ll pin it on with a colon – or maybe an em dash since it looks more like a pin – but some titles probably won’t get more original than “TnT #12”. “TnT” was helpfully suggested to me by a friend as a good abbreviation for “Team in Training”, when I complained that abbreviating it as “TiT” didn’t seem to capture the right spirit of the thing. The numbers will let you know what order these updates were written in, which will come in handy if you ever print out the entire series and have a sudden wind blow all the pages out of your hands, as I’ve often seen happen in the movies. (Speaking of which, I once delivered a best man speech that way, pretending that my notecards had been mixed up so I had to read them out of order.)

Yesterday was a day for rest or cross-training, so I cross-trained by watching Kat exercise to a PS2 video game called “Kinetic”. I invited her to join me for today’s run of the Yard and she did. This was good for me both because it kept my pace slow which is good for my knee right now, and of course, because it’s always nice to have her company on a run. The planned workout was for four miles, but I trimmed it to three because of running conditions and my knee. Two miles running seems to be about the distance my knee can take these days before it either twinges or feels like it’s about to, so today we ran the first two and walked the last. It was early dusk when we started, so by the end of walking the third mile, the cold breeze was making us pretty uncomfortable and the fading light was making it harder to pick out potential stumbling spots on the ground. The Yard provides a pretty level running surface, but like a typical yard, it’s not perfectly even and I didn’t want to risk stumbling or tripping on things I couldn’t see.

Tomorrow is another rest day, and Saturday will be the first team workout. The plan calls for going 1-5 miles, with people going whatever distance they feel ready to go at this point. Unless I’m advised against running when I tell a coach about the knee twinge I’ve been having, I plan to run as much as I comfortably can, and walk the rest, aiming for the max distance of five miles. I know that in terms of fitness, I’m easily up to it, but avoiding injury is more important than going the distance for a training run this far out from the big event. I’m less concerned about the run itself than I am about the early wake-up and long drive I’ll have to make to get there on time. I’m not usually an early riser to begin with, and the first team run is over an hour’s drive away. In fact, most of the team runs will be relatively far from where I live, because it’s the Northern New Jersey chapter of Team in Training, but I live in central New Jersey. As the weekly long runs get longer, I imagine the start times will get earlier. Oy.