Charlie Syracuse

Man have something under your name and occassionally you just forget about it. Well that is what happened. I finished my last race and then started into Triathlon training and totally forgot about my blog.

Well the training is going great at this point. I have decided that I will train for an Oly “Olympic Triathlon” and then race the sprint four weeks prior to the Oly.

This should allow for me to really run a good training run at the company event and to then complete an Oly which is this years goal.

Then I will start thinking about running greater distances and possibly pushing up to a 1/2 Iron.

As far as my running goes I am currently plugging along at a nice 7:30 or so pace on most of my training runs. This is allowing for me to properly gear up for a good race in Sept. Hopefully by then I will be down in the 6:45 pace or so for the race.

SImply to put things straight I have had one of those impossible situations. My computer ground to a complete halt and I needed to reinstall the operating system.

We have to simply reformat at times, but saving your overall work to date is very very critical to the operation. Since I was a linux Mint user I had to find all of my files and save them. The ordeal started out very nice and I put the files on my little bitty 80 gig USB backup drive.

All was going very well at that point, but things aren’t always what they appear. I then had to decide what exact operating system I was going to move too. Ubuntu had just released it’s latest version. But honestly it is becoming way to common, so the search was on.

I downloaded no less than seven seperate live CD’s and started playing. Consuming two days of my life I figured which one was the way to go. Drum roll please.

I am now running Fedora. The red hat system. It is running absolutely great. to date. Hopefully more updates are coming soon.

I am sitting tight and waiting on the race on Friday.  Should be a good one I have my legs getting back in shape and we are working through the pre-race situation.
I will have the stuff together and post my results via the watch and pod.  Should be overall a total blast.

Got my foot pod and heart rate monitor. Now hopefully I can get this Suunto T4 hooked up and putting up some true interesting data.

Today was the first day after a long layoff and just in time for the race this coming friday.  After today I am going to start more detailed analysis in my blogs.  Like my overall times and my breakdown for heart rate and running rate.  Hopefully all of this analysis will allow me to improve my fitness and my overall performance.

Currently I am scaling in at 206 lbs and chugging my 5k’s at a paltry 26 mins or so.  Breaking lower is going to take work, but I think that by the end of summer I can do a 5k in the 20 min range.  Then it is on to the teens and who knows from there.

We need to talk about the overall slacking off I have been doing this past week.  Work has torn me away from my running regime.  I need to roll on and get back in the groove.  One week to a super duper 5k and I am stuck in a rutt and have only run once this week.

If I don’t pick up the pace my weight will be rejoining me and I will be lagging behind everybody this Friday.

First time in the last six years that I have went on what I consider to be a longer run.  This time it was a mid-week 6-miler.  Total elapsed time it was 57 mins and very little on the change.

Now I am looking at finding a cheap HRM and stride sensor set-up to begin training with .  This should help me with the total speed and not overtraining as I have been so found of doing.

At this point I am on target still to hit a 24 min or less 5k on the 18th when we run as an office.  Keep involved and watch what I can do long term.

Well my three and a half mile run today went quite well slow.  As outlined before I finished up a 5k on Sat in Clemson and it wasn’t my best ever effort by far.  However it is getting better and my legs are continuing to strengthen up and get quicker.
But today was simply a very slow running day. Ran the course with my wife and was just hoping the whole time that it would be done.

So what are you doing to get in shape?

Well it is time and time again that I run and find myself hitting the wall at the end of a race.  It has been 5 years since my last 5-k but yet again I found myself at the 2.2 – 2.5 mile point and walking.

I turned in a decent time of 25:31 but would have clearly been under the 25 min mark without the walking and heavy breathing .

We will see if we get past this point.

Well I just carbo loaded my 206 pound frame and am ready to rock and roll in a 5K tomorrow.  This time it is for training mainly and no testosterone must flow forth.  I will be pre-running the race that is to come up on the 18th of April.

This run is the presidential 5K for libraries at Clemson, SC.  I ran the inaugural race back in 2000 or so and haven’t really run a 5k since so this could be an exceedingly interesting test to see if I am closing in on my target of 23 mins.

Seems like all the time I manage to run into running issues.  But my legs are now killing me from playing basketball on monday night.  of course it will pass and we will see how I turn out in the 5k on Sat.
Hopefully I will be able to hit my target of a 25 min total time and be well on my target of 23 mins by April 18th.