Early, early and early

12-13 October 2006

The last three days I’ve been out the door by 6:00 AM. As mentioned previously I’ve been on training all week and hence have had less time in the evenings to fit everything in. Wednesday we had a work dinner, last night I had a yoga class and today I wanted to catch another yoga class which was only offered first thing this morning before work.

Yesterdays run was scheduled for 75 minutes easy in zone 1. I did a loop through downtown which was nice as there was a lot more life in that part of town at that hour. I had one unforeseen incident. The Garmin stopped counting time when it lost the satellite signal. It only started losing the signal when I was downtown which means I didn’t notice that it wasn’t counting time until it was too late. I ended up with an extra 20 minutes to get home and that’s by taking the shortest possible route from downtown. All in all, not life threatening but it was annoying nonetheless.

Both Wednesday and Thursday I lost the satellite signal on my Garmin 305 before the sun came up. It makes me wonder if that’s not a coincidence. The atmospheric conditions just before dawn are slightly different than after the sun comes up. In general, the 305 has been better downtown than the 301. Wednesday, I wasn’t even near any buildings when I lost the signal. So what’s up eh. The satellite had me all over the place through downtown yesterday. I didn’t know that I could run through buildings.

Today I decided that since I had been up early the previous two mornings, I would go to an early morning yoga class. I still kept my regular Ashtanga class last night. This was the first time that I tried the early class. It’s a little heard to get going as I don’t have an opportunity to warm up prior to the class starting. I thought that maybe I’d have to do a few stretches at home next time before heading over. Fortunately its only 5 minutes walk from the house.

The other reason I want to try running early this week is that that will be only time that I can run next Tuesday – Thursday when I’m in Texas. Getting up at 5:20-5:30 made all the difference. My body needs time to wake up. I have to admit that I’m a bit tired today. It would probably take a week or two to get used to such an early schedule if I had to do that on a regular basis.

I’ve been trying to work out how much time I’ll lose in the first 30-45 minutes in NY for the marathon next month. I’ll be lined just ahead of the 4 hour group but there are a lot of people in that time range. My fitness level is a lot higher than a 4 hour marathon now hence my dilemma. I’m going to go check around the web over the weekend. Starting slow is not a bad thing hence it may work out well in the end anyways.