Castlerock State Park is located around the Southwest corner of St Louis county. What’s amazing about this place is that it’s only about a mile from civilization but, once you’re there and hike up the canyon you can see for miles but don’t see a speck of civilization, just nature, green and the Meramec River. I thought I was close to the park when I finished up my last job and since I procrastinated so much that morning with my running figured I would head over to the park to knock out my training for the day. The hike was much tougher than I was used to. According to my Sports-Tracker, the initial part of the hike takes you from an altitude of about 325 feet to 550 ft and just walking that part caught me out of breath and reconsidering my thoughts at a 2nd attempt at the Pikes Peak Ascent which I had attempted (and completed) back in 2008. The thing about Pikes Peak is if you don’t finish in 6 hours then it’s like you were never there. It took me 9 hours but, I finished it, even gave up getting a ride back down to complete it but, that’s another story I’d like to write about sometime.
I knocked out my five, 5-minute intervals of running & walking and when I was done w/ those intervals and back on flat ground I added a bonus minute of jogging. Today was pretty decent, I got to a local park before heading to work and did the same 25 minutes of total training. This park (Long Acre Park) has markers every 1/10th of a mile and during the third five minute interval I decided to get a time from mile marker 0.9 to 1.0 and did so in 53 seconds.
Tomorrow I head up to Nashville, TN for the Country Music Marathon (CMM) aka one of the Rock n Roll (RnR) series events. I also signed up for the St Louis Rock n Roll half marathon on October 19th of this year so I’m eligible for one of the RnR Heavy Metals which you can get by running multiple RnR events in a single year. Below is the medal for the CMM and the bonus medal once two RnR events are completed. 
I think I like the Rock Encore medal better 😉 Right now my thoughts are to do 5 minute intervals of running & walking to get through the CMM on Saturday. I did that method in the Lewis & Clark half marathon a number of years ago (maybe 8?) and wound up with a time of 2:40ish. I don’t think I’m in as good of shape currently so I’ll be shooting to beat the time I got earlier this month on April 5th of 3:20.
I have pondered my procrastination from yesterday and lack of enthusiasm today. I initially conceded that I just didn’t feel like doing the training which, I suppose may happen from time to time but, there might be some recovery issues as well. When I got home from work today I took a nap and crashed for 4 hours!
I’d like to get to Nashville at a decent time tomorrow. There is a seminar at the Expo on Marathon Mentality at 3 p.m. that I’d like to see. I’ve been toying with the idea of heading over to Memphis Saturday after the race and maybe spending a night there but, my main interest would be a little west of Memphis to check out Wynne, Arkansas – the place my marathon will be held on November 1st, 191 days from today 🙂
I did notice my fitbit blogged today on my behalf. Noticing that I was able to link fitbit to wordpress is initially what got blogging on wordpress in my head. I’d always considered wordpress.com to be a bit more professional than say, blogspot, where I kept my previous blog as a chiropractic student. I switched the fitbit update to weekly so anyone following this blog wouldn’t have to be bothered by daily updates of how far I walked 😉
i can run a minute 