I saw a picture of a guy I know running in a tuxedo shirt, and thought wow, that is funny! I want one like that too. I asked him about it, and he said that he actually wears cycling jerseys because they have pockets. Makes sense! The tuxedo shirt he was wearing is made by a company named Primal Wear. It turns out they make a lot of fun cycling jerseys. Another on of the jerseys that they make caught my eye. It resembles a leisure suit, and is in fact named Leisure Ride. I have been looking at it for a while, debating about ordering it. But I finally broke down today and ordered it.
I will likely wear it for the upcoming Rochester Marathon, or possibly a bike ride I have coming up in a few weeks. We’ll see. There are a few other jerseys made by Primal Wear that I would love to have, but maybe down the line. They are kind of expensive, but really cool!
I think I might be a rarity. I do almost all of my training on a treadmill. I only know a few runners locally, and they talk about going off for runs with this person or that person. I run alone. On my treadmill. And since I am not out on the roads, or trails running, I don’t meet a lot of other runners around here. Most of the runners I know, I have met online, and they live in other parts of the country. And I don’t think any of them train exclusively on treadmills.
You would think a treadmill would be a poor substitute for getting out on the road and running. But I have run a couple marathons, a half marathon, and even an extreme trail ultramarathon (50k), and other than a few rare runs outside, all of the running has been on the treadmill.
I like the treadmill because I can set it and run and precise target speeds. This is nearly impossible to do outside. And outside, it is difficult to find nice level terrain, short of going to a track. And if I am going to be running around a track, how is that any better than running on a treadmill?
While it might not be a social vehicle, a treadmill is a great tool for training. Boring yes? But it serves it’s purpose.
I enjoy running marathons, and long distance events. But not so much that I want to just run them with no distractions. I want to have my music playing. Often I will even sing along with my mp3 player while running. During a recent ultramarathon I ran, I had my mp3 player going for nearly the entire eight and half hours. At one point I was running through the woods singing a long with Sir Mixalot’s Baby Got Back. LOL!
But many marathons are starting to ban headphones. Or maybe they had been banned, but now they are starting to enforce the rule. I was just up at Walmart looking for a pocket type radio that I could maybe carry, and I spotted an mp3 player made by Sandisk named the Sansa Shaker. It is actually designed for kids, and has some features I probably don’t care about. But it has a small speaker. It can use headphones as well. But I am thinking I might be able to carry it while I run a marathon, and listen to music, or maybe an audio book. I would want to be careful about the music I loaded on the thing. Eliminating the stuff with explicit lyrics. One draw back is that it will play mp3s, but not wma format files. That’s a drag cuz a bunch of my stuff is in wma format. I can covert it I guess.
The Sansa Shaker costs only $36 at Walmart, so it is relatively cheap. The colors are limited to blue and pink. The docs I have read said the batteries will last 10 or 15 hours using headphones. But no where have I read how long they will last with the speaker.
One concern I had was that it skips to the next song when you shake it. But I did some research and found that you have to hold another button while you shake it. So if I don’t press and hold the button, it should be okay while I am running. Another concern is the volume of the speaker, and the sound quality. I am not expecting high quality sound. But hopefully it sounds okay. And hopefully I will be able to hear it while I am running. If I listen to and audio book, I don’t need super quality sound, but I will at least need to hear it well enough to understand it.
I may buy one tonight and play with it.
Recently I ran an ultramarathon, and somewhere around mile 26, I tripped over a root, or a rock or something. This was about the umpteenth time I tripped over something. But a little ways down the trail, I found that my Polar S1 footpod was no longer on my foot. I backtracked to where I thought I tripped, but could not find it. I am not even sure that is where I lost it. It may have been missing before that.
Anyway, I looked and found the replacement cost is around $130. Ouch!
With that much money, I started considering an alternative. A Garmin Forerunner 305. The Forerunner has some neat features that the Polar doesn’t have. One of the features I am excited about is the virtual training partner. I think that might help me keep pace while running a marathon. Also the I think the pace, and distance might be more accurate than the Polar footpod. But all that remains to be seen. It will be helpfull at times to have the GPS feature as well.
So I ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305. I debated about about the 205 vs the 305. The 305 comes with the heart rate monitor. I use the HRM feature during races more as an information type thing. I don’t use it really during the race. But the 305 was only abotu $50 more than the 205, so I thought what the heck.
I glanced at the schedule before, and the workouts looked pretty intense. At the time I was working out with a heart rate monitor system where I was supposed to keep my HR low. But I wasn’t getting any faster, and my aerobic fitness didn’t seem to be as good as it had been when I was doing easy/hard workouts. So I switched, and my running improved.
I am currently using a schedule that I created myself that it modified from a schedule in the 4 Months To A 4 Hour Marathon. I previously used the 4:30 schedule from the book and ran a 4:21 marathon. So I took the 4:00 schedule and tweaked it into a 3:30 schedule.
But now I am looking at the Furman FIRST training schedule. It is similar to my schedule, but drops the easy runs. The other runs also look harder. I ordered the book Runner’s World Run Less, Run Faster: Become a Faster, Stronger Runner with the Revolutionary FIRST Training Program. That supposedly contains schedules for all the Boston Qualifying times.
RIght now, I am debating jumping from my home-made schedule into the FIRST schedule with only 7 weeks to go. LOL! I jumped into the 4 Months To A 4 Hour Marathon with about as much time left, and it worked out pretty well.
I am not expecting to run a 3:30 marathon in September, but a sub hour marathon would be awesome!