Now why does Blogger look different than it did yesterday? I'm confused. We spend so much time at work agonizing over user interfaces and breaking in our users (who are all internal) to things like changing a color or a font, and most commercial websites just randomly change the whole UI more often than I change my sheets and think nothing of it. There's something to not offering phone support that makes your users a bit less threatening.



So anyway, I wanted to cover my last two road races, the first of which was on June 25, an extremely hot and humid early evening, but not as hot and humid as that race I did last summer in Chicago. Thought it might be a good way to gauge my acclimitization to the real summer weather, since I was planning on doing a Chicago race again this year and those can always be counted on to be in miserable weather. This local one was the same 5K course I've run in two previous races, starting and ending at the Wayside health club, but whether it was the heat or time of day or what, I managed to run it nearly two minutes slower than last time (which was a pleasant Sunday morning). For Marlborough, it's an average run, with a couple of significant but not killer hills, and I felt fine the whole way, but came around the last corner further behind than I thought I'd be.



Last Sunday, Scott, Bob and I ran my first 8K, associated with the Four Bridges of Elgin bike race that was happening later that same day. This was an early morning race, the weather was pretty forgiving, there was one short hill but otherwise flat, and the roads were completely closed off to traffic. The bad thing was there were only about 100 people in the race, so I was afraid of finishing dead last, and that's exactly what I did (only by a few seconds, but still). Not that Bob or Scott faired much better (Scott held off a bit to run with me, Bob finished about 1:15 ahead of us). Leading up to this race I've been running longer distances, since at one point we thought we might do a 10K, and again I felt fine the whole way, and didn't feel like I was going particularly slow.



The annoying thing is that after two-plus years of running on a regular basis, plus the year and half it took to work up to running 3 miles at all, I'm not a second faster than I ever was, and in fact if anything seem to be getting slower, and it's really irritating. For a while I've been content to just run longer distances and challenge myself that way, and it's been a good way to keep things interesting and see some areas of town that I've never been through before. By the end of the fall I'd like to have run from the house in all four directions on four different runs to the border of Marlborough with the next town. Southborough was the easy one, that's already in the bag. Hudson isn't that far, but requires scaling a major hill in both directions to do it. Northborough and Sudbury are both over three miles in one direction (particularly if you avoid Route 20), so those may take a while, but are certainly doable.



But I'd also like to be able to run at least a little faster than I am now. I don't have to finish first (Chloe stopped being interested in watching me race when she figured out that I wasn't going to win), but it would be nice to finish in a respectable time, say 27 minutes for a 5K and 50 minutes for an 8K. I need a program to follow that I can stick with, so I'm planning on scouring my running magazines to find something suitable. I don't need to go further than 10K at this point, it would just take too long, so if I can speed up a a little bit, that would get the same run down in less time, at least a little less time. I shouldn't be so old yet that I can't still improve, I just need to analyze my habits and figure out how to do it. The nice weather will only last for so long, then it's back to the treadmill, so now's the time to do it.