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CHECKMARK ✓

Running Journey Unfiltered:
​Motivation・Facilitation ・Reflection

19/52

5/15/2017

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Week 19 ✕ Sporting Life 10K Toronto Recap

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The last photo taken before losing my phone and losing my mind during the run
I had the great pleasure once again to represent Team Running Free at this year's Sporting Life 10K along side with my avid weekend warrior group of friends. Aside from the Scotiabank Waterfront race in mid-October, this particular race down Yonge Street is my favourite perennial measuring stick of the progress that I have made from a year-to-year basis. I have become increasingly prepared and well equipped for each of these runs as each year passes and these kind of morning rituals are extremely helpful leading up to the even more important races. Case and point: the Barrie Half-Marathon that is coming up in two weeks time.

However, I was not completely prepared. I had finished a late night shift from my casual part-time work the day prior. I also left the house without my almighty important GPS watch in the morning. Systemically, I turn to plan B which is using my iPhone to track the running data for this race.

The first five kilometres was nothing but a straight downhill down on Yonge Street. Without thinking too much, I bolted out of the start line with speed and let the gravity take care of the rest. The flaw is that by manually engaging start on the Strava phone app, I lose concentration and placed my phone into my shorts pocket with the zipper 1/4 zipped up. Bad move. Just briefly after crossing Yonge and Eglinton, my Bluetooth wireless earbuds lose connection and my music was gone. "Oh it's just a bad connection" - so I thought. Kept pushing the power button and volume buttons; no reaction. Thats when unnecessary adrenaline rush kicked in with guilt. "Should I keep going? Or turn back?" That notion of uncertainty essentially carried on throughout the remainder of the race. I went to the conclusion that I may as well run faster to the finish line so that I can find out what to do next when finished. That's when I realized I was at the 7K mark, I think where the second water station is? The speed was constant with not as many obstruction while the elevation is now flat.

And soon enough, I managed to push my way into the finish line - of course not knowing my official race time and not so much of satisfaction had things gone the way they were supposed to be.

The next steps were asking strangers and my buddies with iPhones to borrow their phone and use "Find My Phone" app. At first, my heart sank as the first two locations tracked of my phone was gradually shifted southbound. "Fuck, somebody must've stolen it for sure" - so I thought. That's when I decided to remotely set it into Lost Mode and call my phone soon after to test my luck. To my delight, that person picked up the phone and responded. "We have your phone and meet us down at Princess Gate!" Major sigh of relief but still angsty. Let my main group momentarily to go to the specific area where the person said to meet. Alas, there was the person, a wife and husband with their kids, stroller and all. "My husband tried to get you but you were too fast to catch up!" she exclaimed. I guess that's where I might have gotten too carried away when I was running downhill.
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My takeaway: always activate your iCloud / Google account so that you can remotely locate your phone. If you have a valid iCloud account, simply login to "Find my Phone" app whereas for Android users, login your Google credentials to the official "Android Device Manager" app.

After the scary episode, I looked up my results on sportstats.ca and looks like a new PB and slashing 2 minutes from last year. ​

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My takeaway: always activate your iCloud / Google account so that you can remotely locate your phone. If you have a valid iCloud account, simply login to "Find my Phone" app whereas for Android users, login your Google credentials to the official "Android Device Manager" app.

After the scary episode, I looked up my results on sportstats.ca and looks like a new PB and slashing 2 minutes from last year. ​

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10/52

3/12/2017

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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! 
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Cold AF...

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
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