Today was another CARA Training evening. And once again, it was pretty warm at 83 degrees with 54% humidity. At least there was a cool breeze blowing. But I was prepared! I was fully hydrated, put half water/half Powerade in my water bottle, and had dinner (took in some salt) about two hours prior to the run. So I felt pretty good that I could deal with it.
I started the day at 6AM with my TEAM Weight Loss cardio program. This was the beginning of a second 12-week session with Meghan, my Personal Trainer. Put in 3.1 miles and burned almost 700 calories. It felt good, even the inclines! Then it was off to work.
At 6:30PM, we started off the CARA program with speakers from PowerBar. We had a great conversation about fueling, hydration, sodium intake, electrolytes, carbs, and protein. It was great. They brought about eight boxes of product for us to try out later. This stuff is expensive so I am not gonna lie -- I took abot 3-4 of each product they had. I filled a bag! So now I have enough fuel choices to last a couple of months once I start my Marathon training in late August and it cost me nothing! I am looking forward to experimenting with this stuff to see what will work for me as I train. I want to have a solid fueling plan in place before the Disney run in January.
We went out on the run -- 3.6 miles today! Because of the heat, I decided to take it easy. I even took three 1-minute walk breaks just to recover, My average pace was 11:40 -- some laps on my watch were around 10:30 and others were at 12:30 -- I just ran at whatever pace felt good at the moment. I was the only 10K runner tonight so I had two leaders running with me which was cool. Next week, we will be running 4 miles. I am looking forward to that. I only have six weeks left for my 10K race and I want to be running a strong 5 miles at least two weeks before the race.
Back on July 4th, I got in a short run of about 2.3 miles in a new recreational park in Crystal Lake, Pretty park but the trails there are too short, and I prefer not to lap around a course if I can help it. But that was fine because I wanted to put in a relaxing run after the killer heat run on Saturday. I have plans for increasing the distance at that location by running 'to' the park from about 1.5 miles away. That will be my plan for the next time I choose to run there. Gotta keep things interesting, right?