Boise must have it out for me....

So now that my sprained ankle has healed, I have managed to sprain my finger while doing a long run.  Yes...my finger.  We ran out in the foothills today for our long run, and in a lot of spots the snow and ice hasn't melted at all....while going down a hill in one part that was pretty slippery I fell and sprained my finger, made my triceps sore, burned some skin on my upper thigh and knee on the ice, and somehow managed to cut my ankle...maybe on a rock??  Yeah.  I at least managed to catch myself before falling in the icy creek that was next to the trail.  Other than those 30 seconds or less, the run was wonderful :o).  Not sure how I keep managing these things....

On a different note, I got the job that I interviewed for on Wednesday.  SO, I decided to put my two weeks notice in at the YMCA (the job hours conflicted with each other) because I will be making almost a dollar more an hour and working 10-15 hours more a week to start with.  The potential to move up is there whereas in my job now, that is non-existent....plus, I will be unemployed at the Y from the middle of May to the end of August because there is no school during those months.  Financially this makes more sense.  The company that I am going to work for is really flexible and has done everything to accommodate me so far and have been very friendly and easy going.  I am pretty excited about it.  PLUS, it is about 10-15 minutes closer than the job I am at now.

I suppose that is all I have for now...I am going to get back to studying for the GRE (I plan on taking it in February).  Hope you are all doing well!

Quite chilly....

  It has been veeeery chilly here the past week.  Yesterday it finally warmed up to 31 degrees! :o)  It has been in the low 20's for most of the week and dropping down to near 0 at night.  I went to scrape the ice off my car this morning at 8:30 and my wet hair froze.  The fountains everywhere are all frozen over, and I would like to know why...WHY is it necessary to turn them on when it isn't going to reach anywhere near above freezing??

 I went in for another interview yesterday afternoon at a place in Boise called AFI (Advocates For Inclusion).  It would be as a developmental therapy technician, working with kids and adults with disabilities.  Basically teaching them important life skills so that they can be functionally independent in life.  I believe it went well....I think the only reason I may not get it is because they are looking for mostly people who can work the hours of 3:30PM-6:30PM, and my other job at the YMCA starts at 3:15 and goes until 5:30 or 6....OR I have practice at 5:45.  We will see.  It would be a fun job.  I also found out Monday, in a meeting with my supervisor, that my hours will be increasing at the Y.  I will become the head of the Youth Enrichment Programs at Siena Elementary (where I am at now) until they find a replacement...she will be leaving at the end of January.  SO I have been given a lot more responsibility which will increase my hours. :o)  Right now I am teaching a science class on Mondays and Wednesdays and helping supervise in the Chess class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I MAY be teaching a Middle School Madness hangout session in the gym where we would do a bunch of team builders and fun activities, but so far no one has signed up for that class, so that is up in the air.

 This week we start our new phase of training.  I will be running about 60 miles a week now and workouts will be Tuesday and Friday nights.  The hard workouts will be our minutes work....which is a lot easier to explain in person, but I shall try here. :o)  We will do a warm up of about 2-2 1/2 miles and then go right into the minutes, which looks like this: 1-2-3-3-2-1 (this is Friday's workout for this week).  Basically you run 1 minute at 85% of our race pace effort, then equal rest, meaning 1 minute of 65% race effort.  Then after the 1 minute at 65% we will go right into the 2 minutes of 85%, then 2 minutes at 65%.  After we have completed the last minute (in this case) of 85% and then at 65% we will go right into a 2- 2 1/2 mile cool down.  OR we will run right back to the track and do a 1200m interval....but that is not at the end of every minutes workout.  I think only the times we do a hilly minutes session.  I know...confusing. :o)  It's a lot more simple than it may look.  They are pretty short workouts, but more intense.  We are having a seminar this Saturday morning from 9-12 on the minutes workout and what they do for us in our training.  Should be interesting!  My coach is really good about explaining why he has us doing the workouts, runs, and training he does.  He has taught at a couple Olympic conferences so his talks/discussions/ideas are pretty popular. :o)

  Well, I am off to study a little bit for the GRE test that I will hopefully be taking at the beginning of February.  I am planning on going back to get my masters in the fall.  I will be attending BSU (assuming I get accepted...and get all of my stuff in on time) and will start the masters program for Exercise and Sport Science/Kinesiology for Exercise Physiology.

Hope you are all doing well!!

I will also add the website where I track all of my training.  You can go on here and see all of my PR's, workouts, paces, times.....etc.  It is strands (based in Spain, but also started in Corvallis my last year and a half there)...my site is: http://www.strands.com/mishlerr9  

Due to many requests....

  I have been asked by a few people, mainly two certain someones, to share my adventures while out running....apparently they are worth blogging about.  I shall do my best to provide a vivid explanation of the events that have occurred.  SO, I will start on those...let the anticipation begin.

  On a different note, I had a wonderful holiday season with family.  I went home a few days before Christmas and just got back last night.  It is pretty chilly here...It got up to about 25 degrees today and will be about the same tomorrow.  Apparently we will reach the high 30's by Thursday and Friday, only to dip back down before receiving more fluffy white stuff.  Needless to say, everything is quite crunchy. :o)  A little bit of snow still left on the ground, but most of the paths and sidewalks are clear so I can run at a decent pace without making a fool of myself :o).

 I applied to a few other places this morning and received a call for an interview to one of them!  It is as a developmental therapist at a place called Advocates for Inclusion, Inc.  The main location is in Nampa, but they have a location in Boise as well.  It would be working with children and adults with disabilities...teaching them the skills to get through each day.  SOOO, I am going in on Wednesday afternoon for a group interview.  We will see how it goes!

  I suppose that is it for now......hope you all had a wonderful holiday season!


 

 

Leave it to me...

  Last night was the first workout of this phase of training....and I got not even two miles into it and fell, spraining my ankle pretty good.  I got right back up and walked (hobbled) for about a minute then started jogging again and just gradually picked back up my pace.  We were doing a steady run of 8-9 miles so I had about 6 left to do on it.  Coley (my training partner) actually started getting bad stomach pains about 4 miles into it, so the run was quite the disaster for both of us!  BUT we still managed to get in 7 and a half miles in 53 minutes (7:07 pace).  Slower than we wanted, but with how the night went, we were just grateful.  My coach asked me what patch of ice I slipped on....and I just looked at him, smiling, and he says: "You would.  I pick the clearest of clear paths that I can find and and you manage to trip over a tiny bump in the road that you probably never knew was there."  He was correct.....I have been fighting the black ice, snow, and sleet for a week now and haven't had any issues...the path is finally clear and I hit a bump the wrong way and go down.  He has sympathy for me though because he has done that on numerous accounts.  :oD  It is pretty dark out there when we run, so I am surprised something hasn't happened yet!

 SO, today is a day off for me.  Just going to give it a rest and keep icing it, trying to keep the swelling down.  I'll run my 4 mile morning run tomorrow and then hopefully be able to do the 8-9 mile hilly steady run in the evening. 

  This month's focus is on mileage and core work.  The mileage is to take what we accomplished this fall and have our bodies store it so that when we begin "winter minutes" next month, we are aerobically very fit.  I talked with Coach on the phone this morning and he said he knows I am going to improve a lot the next few months, and at a really fast pace, so he may start putting me with the guys on some workouts to push myself to where he knows I can be.  He also informed me today that he predicted that I could run 1:20 or faster for a half marathon at this point right now.  VERY good news because that would allow me (in theory) to complete a marathon in 2:46, which is the qualifying time for the Olympic Trials. :o)

  Well, I am off to ice my ankle some more. :o)  Hope you are all doing well!!

Snowy pictures :o)

A path in Hulls Gulch that I run on sometimes...up behind my house.

Top of Hull's Gulch

My house :o)

Snow, Snow, and more Snow :o)

  Looks like it has been awhile since I have updated anything on here!   Let's see...

  I ran my 6k time trial last month and it went very very well.  I ran a minute and 5 seconds faster than my PR from a couple of years ago.  It was VERY cold that morning and I ran it by myself in 20:55.  Also managed to break my 3k and 5k pr's as well :o).  My coach was really pleased with it.  Mom was here visiting that weekend so she got to see it :o).


  I am now almost finished with the de-training phase...this is the last week for it, and then I will begin phase 2 of the training.  My mileage will go up a little bit and I will have 2 steady runs a week, one will be hilly.  Saturdays will be another workout of a fartlek or FCR (Fast Continuous Run...not the same as a steady...I know, confusing :o)).  The other days will be 6-8 miles.  


  I went home for Thanksgiving and will be home again at the end of this month for almost 2 weeks.  I get that time off of work because there is no school, so I get to go see family :o).  


  I came back to about 3 or 4 inches of snow left on the ground from the storm during Thanksgiving...it got down to about -2 degrees.  My roommate said the morning after it had snowed quite a bit, she opened her car door and a pile of snow fell in....and that same pile of snow was there 4 days later because of how cold it got :o).


  Another storm came in this week...it is still snowing. :o)  It has snowed about 5 or 6 inches since yesterday late afternoon.  We had practice last night at 6 and it was VERY pretty to run in :o)  We were the only ones out on the greenbelt so it was peaceful :O)  The run this afternoon should be interesting :oD  


  I didn't have work today because of school closures, but I am teaching the holiday cooking class on Mondays and Wednesdays and then the Ronald McDonald (who I think is really creepy...) on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  For the Ronald McDonald house we will make winter decorations and crafts to take over on the 16th and help decorate for Christmas.  We also put on a drive to collect items the house needs so we will make posters for that and put it together to get donations.  It should be fun :o)


  Well, I am off to make some lunch before I go out and run.  :o) 

End of the first phase....

  Well, it looks as if I won't be racing the Eagle Island race next weekend.  My coach and I have chatted and decided that it would be more beneficial for me to run a 6k race effort on my own Saturday morning instead of competing in the Nike Cross Country 5k.  He said with as much as I have accomplished this season (running faster and competing stronger than he predicted), the 5k next weekend wouldn't be beneficial in my training at this point.  It would be smarter to run a 6k race test effort on my own.  SO, that is what I will be doing.

  I had a workout with my coach on Wednesday evening and he shared with me some encouraging news.  The times that I was running for my intervals were close to the times that one of his female athletes, Cynthia (she retired this spring), had been running last year at this time.  This is encouraging because she ran in the Olympic trials. :O)  He said my workouts were right there where hers had been at this time last year and she had been his athlete for a number of years at that point...WHICH bodes well for me as I have only been his athlete for about 9 weeks.  His training is all about time and compounding, so it usually takes a year or two before seeing significant increases in successes. 

  After next weekend, we will start a de-training phase for a couple of weeks, and then begin a new one.  The de-training phase is just a time to give our bodies a chance to repair more completely and give it a rest after all the hard interval training and racing we have been doing.  I will only be running 5 or 6 miles a day and take a day or two off.  I haven't taken a day off in the 9 weeks I have been with him...I think my first day off will be after I have been under his training for 11 weeks.  After this phase (beginning of December) we will start a strength and endurance phase.  We will begin doing drills (to improve speed and form), running more hilly runs(to develop more power), and longer minutes work-outs instead of intervals (to develop endurance).  I have always liked the strength and endurance phases of training, so I am excited :o).  It is tough, but very rewarding.  I have always been able to see a huge difference in my training when we complete this phase.  This phase will probably go until the beginning of March...when we will start running more races again.  

  The weather has been warmer again...70's and sunny. :o)  I think we may have some snow next week so it will get significantly cooler again!  I officially start my job at the YMCA on Monday, so that will be good for me.  Looking to find another part time job...keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that something comes up soon.

  Hope you are all doing well! :o)