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Week 10 Recap

Highlight of the week: From shorts weather to bundle from head-to-toe weather

This is the joy (or can also be the pains) of running in Canada! This week started off from a comfortable 11ºC to the bone chilling -12ºC before even factoring in the wind chill! Last week I mentioned how I got into the running groove by slightly lowering my clearance keeping an upward posture. This week was all about mental tune-ups. While logging miles and extracting data is important, it is even important to actually enjoy your run and position it as a weekly obligation. After all, it is indeed a personal choice and nobody forces us to do so! My end goal for this tune-up is essentially "rehearsals" for the actual race day in two weeks time. 

This week has also been a week of technical difficulties, namely the MyAsics app where it has helped substantially when it comes to gearing up for races.  Currently my mobile running app usages consist of the following:

Nike+ Run Club | Strava | TomTom Sports* | MyAsics | MapMyRun | Runkeeper
*Note: TomTom Sports is the native corresponding app to my HR GPS watch

Each of the apps named are uniquely motivating and can provide different individualized metrics that could be personally beneficial. In my opinion, the Nike NRC app is a great common ground to interact with your closest social media circle. The Strava app provides lots of athletic specific metrics as well as benchmarks set by amateurs and elite runners alike. My beef in this case is towards the MyAsics app. It has been quite effective when reasonably predicting my prospective race times within my past 2016 race year but their data synchronization falls way short from working as it should. Sync and manual importing from the MyAsics app is cumbersome. My real reason for using all these apps is to populate all available data and making the best judgement without giving in to the respective app's "pay to play" freemium tier. While every hobby can get costly with related equipments, I don't feel that paying for that extra locked data would realistically give me that edge to leap ahead. Plus, it further sentiments my ideas to learn from the social media and hashtags, hence the whole reason for this blog to log this entire journey of learning to run competitively with essentially nothing. Then again, things can change from there on and if I'm convinced enough to upgrade with those premium app tiers, I'll definitely share my thoughts from there too! 

Cold AF...

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What's NExt & Extras

This upcoming week will be the homestretch for the regular mileages before gradually tapering for the week after in anticipation of the Around the Bay 30K race. The "train smarter not harder" mantra will also be detrimental as there is going to be a nasty snowstorm system to start off the week.

I want to share a very helpful gym workout guide, originally shared recently by one of my avid runner buddy (Hi Sammie! ☺️), that seems to really enhance lower body movement and help compliment your existing running agility. It is called the David McHenry Dynamic Stretching Routine and some of the recommended stretches may already be something that you are already doing. If not (such as people like me...), it is slowly being integrated into my gym workouts that also consist of moderate weights. Sampler movements as shown!

Anywho, back on the grind- cheers! MW