Earth Day - 4/22

For Earth Day (and for my own reasons), I went straight to Lea's and ran around her neighborhood before dinner. I didn't look up a route beforehand, but I had an advantage since I used to live in the same neighborhood. I wasn't really sure how far it was going to be, but I knew where I was going to run... and of course I had forgotten how far it really was. The "shortcut" that I took through a neighborhood and up a gigantic grassy hill (really big!) didn't help, since it would have been faster to skip the "shortcut" and just continue on my way.

All in all, it was a good workout, and it was nice to get outside and see what that feels like. I did about 4.14 miles in 55 minutes, which is not too far from my pace on the last treadmill run I did (4.5 miles in 55 minutes). It felt as though I walked more than I ran, so I wanted to map it out based on where I walked/ran to see what it all added up to. Of course, I used Gmaps Pedometer, but the image below is just from regular old Google Maps (and me drawing on it through Photoshop), where I just discovered the "Terrain" setting... that's been there all along:

Apparently I only ran 2.05 miles of that distance... not as much as I would have hoped. Since my Nike+iPod is only calibrated for walking (working on it...), I don't know how fast I ran, but I do know that my usual walking pace is somewhere around 16.5 minutes/mile. If that's true... then I spent 34.48 minutes walking and 20.52 minutes running... which means I ran at roughly... 10 minutes per mile? That sounds awfully fast, but maybe that's why I wimped out and started running less at a time. (I'm also bad at math, so if you notice an error please feel free to let me know...)

I've always been a sprinter; Andy actually commented this weekend on how I like to go fast and get things done. It's true—the longest race I ever wanted to swim was one that took only 2 minutes. I'm not a long-distance anything—so why am I running a marathon?! :)

While I've been writing this post (amidst work... all day... at least work is taking the priority here!) I've discovered something called MapMyRun. It seems as though you can map your bike rides too. Interesting... I'm going to check into this further and report back soon.