May 2014 recap

I closed the books on May with 161 miles, which is the fourth month in a row with a higher mileage than the previous one. (April was 150.) Of course, a big reason for that steady increase is that I hurt both of my Achilles tendons at the beginning of the year, so I was recovering and then building mileage up slowly in those early months.

Most of the increase has come from stretching my long run from 10 miles out to 12+. My pace on those runs has slowed a bit but that's okay, as a long run should be slow and easy. On a few other occasions, I've thrown in a second run in the late afternoon, usually 3 very easy miles.

One thing that helps with stretching out long runs is to have something captivating to listen to. Right now, I'm working my way through Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star, which is a gigantic (900+ pages) space opera that takes up 30+ hours on the audio version.

And it's part 1 of a two-part series.

With a subsequent trilogy set in the same universe with many of the same characters. (Though, I should note, the trilogy's books are shorter, only about 600 pages each.) So I'd say I've got plenty to get me through long slow runs.

You'd think the weather would help too. This is what things looked like on Friday:

Looks pretty gorgeous; Pacific Northwest summers are to die for. But, that sunshine also translates into warmth, which is somewhat suboptimal for running. Much better is weather like what there was for the start of this morning's run:

That's basically the same stretch of road. With sunshine, it was into the 70s; with the cloud cover, it was around 60. By the middle of this long run, though, the clouds had mostly burned off and it warmed up, but in some ways, this was the best of both worlds: cool for part of the run, and sunny and warm for the rest of the day.