Over the past few months I have been on a calorie restricted diet. I haven’t been doing anything crazy. I’m not using any fad diet or chemicals to lose weight. I have just been tracking my daily calorie intake using The Daily Plate from Live Strong. It’s been great for losing a few extra pounds here and there, but recently I’ve been wondering if the calorie restriction is negatively impacting my performance.

Charmaine is out of town this week. That usually means I don’t sleep well. I didn’t sleep well last night. When you combine a lack of calories with a lack of sleep, you really shouldn’t expect stellar performance. I certainly didn’t perform anywhere near stellar today.

It’s been extremely cold and wet lately. The weatherman even predicted rain and snow AGAIN today. I put on a long-sleeved shirt and a big hat to go out running. It was still pretty cold, but the factor I hadn’t thought too much about was the wind. It was really strong today. I was running into a headwind almost the whole first mile. That was a bad mile for me. RunKeeper kept telling me I was almost a minute behind pace. I didn’t make up much time on mile 2, and mile 3 was just terrible. But at least I finished. I’m sick of saying that, but I don’t have anything else good to say, so I have to stick with that… for now.

31:31

That’s my worst run since March 18th (4 weeks ago). It’s time to take it up a notch.

I ran with Murphy today. He was there from the moment I decided I was really going to venture out into the icy cold rain and howling wind. He made sure I followed his law.

My iPhone GPS was acting up again. I did my best to get it to come to an understanding of where I really was, but if you look at the map on RunKeeper, you’ll see that it got very lost along the way. I’m not really sure how it can get so confused so often. I’m hoping it has something to do with interference from the rain, but I’m not very impressed with it to say the least.

My drawstring broke. My shorts dropped. I fell to the ground. My phone buzzed with text message after text message until I thought someone was desperately trying to get in touch with me. I accidentally paused RunKeeper for a few seconds trying to figure out who was texting me so much. It turned out to be text spam. I hate text spam. I did figure out how to resume RunKeeper, but it wasn’t pretty.

30:13

When I used to complain about the weather in high school, my swim coach would say something like, “It’s sunny somewhere else right now, where your competition is training. You may choose not to train today, but when you meet him, he will beat you.” That’s why I decided to run today, and that’s why I kept deciding to keep running each time I wanted to call it quits today.

The weather was really nice Monday evening, so Charmaine and I took our bikes out for a little spin. We did our short route, which takes us up into Alpine, over to the road that goes up to Suncrest, and then back home. It’s only 16 miles with very little climbing, but it’s really fun. I always ride with my phone, so I decided to try RunKeeper on the ride. I don’t listen to music while I ride, and I didn’t want the phone telling me I was on or off pace every five minutes, so I disabled the audio cues. Charmaine has a Garmin 705, but I just have a simple bike computer, so I thought it would be cool to have additional data. It was cool. I’ll definitely do that again.

Today I got all excited, thinking I was somehow way ahead of my pace when I made it all the way to the park at the center of The Cedars without hearing the voice tell me how far ahead or behind I was. Soon it was obvious that I had no idea if I was on pace or not. The further I got from where I normally hear the audio cue, the more I wondered what was wrong. Eventually I remembered that I had disabled the audio cues for biking. I wish I could set it differently for different sports. Knowing that I had no idea if I was ahead or behind was a little discouraging. I remembered thinking how much time I cut off the first time I used RunKeeper with the audio cues. I figured I better just push myself hard and see what happens.

I knew I wanted to improve my pace going up the big hill right after the 2 mile mark, so I focused on that. I think I did alright, but I was still dead by the time I hit the top. I pushed myself through mile 3, but I was obviously off my pace by quite a bit. I finished the activity and wrote some notes on my phone before I had any clue how I had done. I actually thought I had done much better than I had, which you can tell from my notes.

30:25

I guess those audio cues make a bigger difference than I thought. I’m turning them back on right now.

I didn’t run last Friday. It was snowing, the wind was howling, and it was really cold outside. Plus, I thought I may wind up going skiing again on Saturday, so it was easy to justify not heading out into the blizzard. I had no convenient excuses today. The sun was out, the snow was gone, the wind was calm, and I didn’t end up skiing, so my legs were fresh. It was the perfect day to be outside.

I started out great. I felt good going up the hill by the church and all the way through The Cedars. I hit the 2 mile mark at 18:42, but then I died on the big hill into the last mile. I need to figure out how to get my butt up that hill a little faster. I spend way too much time there. I also need to figure out how to have some energy left to bring it home after I get up that hill. I did manage to finish the last mile at a respectable pace, but I know I can do better.

29:44

I think I could have done a fourth mile today, but only if it was completely flat, or slightly downhill. Maybe it really is time to start thinking up a longer route.

Last night Charmaine and I rode our trainers for an hour. I took it somewhat easy, knowing that I had to run today. I felt pretty good afterwards and good again this morning. I’m still not sure if that played into my terrible performance today, but I don’t have a lot of other excuses, so that’s what I’m going with.

Wanting to avoid another confusing map in RunKeeper, I decided to make sure my iPhone believed I was starting from the right spot. Nope. It thought I was about a half mile away again. I had to fight with it for about ten minutes to convince it I was here and not there before starting my run. Maybe that played into my difficulty?

Excuses aside, I felt pretty good starting out, but by the time I hit the first corner I realized that my cadence was too high and my stride was too short. In other words, I was just spinning my wheels and not really going anywhere. I tried to step it up a bit going up the first hill, but my suspicions were confirmed at the 5 minute mark when RunKeeper announced, “You are behind your target pace by 14 seconds.” That wasn’t nearly as motivating as finding out I was ahead of my target pace. I tried to push it after that, and I did get ahead of my target pace for a bit, but that last mile just took me apart. Still, I’m happy to have finished with a decent time.

30:09

Maybe I’m not quite ready to add that 4th mile.

I have seen various different workout tracking applications for mobile devices, for social media, and on stand-alone websites. I haven’t ever been impressed with any of them. I have even had discussions with friends about making one that would be worth using. None of us ever did anything about it, and it looks like we won’t need to. Lately I have been seeing a lot of Facebook news items from friends using RunKeeper.com, so I figured I should check it out. I like it. It’s completely free to use. There seems to be some advanced features that you can subscribe to, but I can’t imagine what they are, because I have everything I want already with their free offering.

They have a website and a mobile app that work together. The iPhone app uses the GPS in your phone to track your location, elevation, and pace as you run. It can even talk to you to tell you if you’re on pace or behind. The only drawback is that you have to run with your phone. I don’t have a great way of keeping my phone with me while I run. I put it in my pocket and ran earbuds out of my pocket. There were two little problems with this setup: 1- I kept pulling my earbuds out of my ears when my arm would accidentally catch the cord as I ran and 2- the weight of the phone in the pocket of my shorts kept pulling my shorts down as I ran. I think I can solve both of those problems.

In the mean-time, I am very happy with RunKeeper. I set my target pace for 10:00 minutes per mile and told it to update me every 5 minutes. As I crossed the 5 minute marker, it told me I was exactly on my pace target. That motivated me to run a little faster. By the 10 minute mark I was ahead of my target pace. I stayed ahead the rest of the run, despite slowing way down on the big hill coming up Ironwood. The best part about RunKeeper is that you can see exactly how I ran today. And if you join my “street team” you can even see the map and trace my route. It’s really slick.

29:30 (click my time to see my activity on RunKeeper)

It seems that little bit of motivation goes a long way. I think this makes 5 best times in a row. Amazing. Now I have a dilemma. I told myself when I started breaking 30 minutes I would add another mile to the run. I guess it’s time to start thinking about a new route.