Run 50, 2009 Wild Alberta Roses

Boy, I’m sure having a rough time getting back into my running schedule these days but hopefully today marks that beginning. It’s been raining steadily since early last night. But I delayed a bit and headed out around 1 PM and I saw that the rain had ended although the cloud cover was still threatening. I made the run without rain but it was a bit humid. My run went quite well with an average pace of 7:20. As usual, my Runkeeper application on my iPhone was 0.65 kilometers short due to losing signal from time to time, no doubt because of the trees. This application is great, I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with an iPhone or iPod. The problem lies with the GPS signal strength and how it gets blocked by the trees. I wonder if it is because of the water content or just the physical blocking by the wood, or by both? I was thinking they should boost the signal strength but that probably wouldn’t be workable nor would it help the signal tunnel through obstructions much.

Anyway, in spite of the rain the bird sanctuary where I run is still bone dry. Absolutely no water birds there. I did hear a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker nest. I couldn’t see it as I ran by but I know what it was because of the baby birds crying to their parents for food. If you have an observable nest just outside your door at home you would see why that sound is unmistakable. What really made me almost swoon was that the Alberta Wild Roses are in full bloom and the fresh rained cleaned air was very heavy with their perfume. It was so strong running through the underbrush that I wondered if there was any room left for oxygen! There were a lot of other wonderful woodsy floral smells too, but I couldn’t identify any. I got a strange but delightful citrus smell that puzzled me greatly since nothing citrus grows here that I am aware of.

I ordered an arm band from a web site Dave suggested at Tribal Running that looks like it will be a great product. The site where I ordered my “Xtreme 30″ arm band is http://www.armpocket.com/index.php and I will be posting a review on it. Because if anyone can make that product fail it will be me.

I’m still tentative on my running schedule. I want to run 3 days a week and I do karate cross training two days a week. Right now I ran today (Tuesday) which puts my other two runs on Thursday and Saturday (Saturday is when all my races happen). The problem is Monday I have karate, Tuesday I run, Wednesday I have karate, and Thursday I run. Since karate is such an intense difficult workout I will likely have to keep those two runs really low key and slow. I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it since the summer season is so relatively short. The fall/winter season will likely go back to Tuesdays and Saturdays for karate so then my running schedule will get back to normal. And normal for me is to train for a spring marathon.

Anyway, I can’t wait to receive and test out my new armband. I have never worn an armband of any kind so I am really skeptical about it.