Foto Friday

Well, today I thought I would share a little of my recent trip to the Central Coast of California. If you are familiar with the area, I had to go to Santa Maria for a business dinner Tuesday night. Santa Maria is about an hour north of Santa Barbara, and about three and a half hours north of my home. Once you make it out of the Los Angeles metropolitan area (about two hours of driving for me), this is one of the prettiest drives around.

Some of the drive is *right* along the ocean. I have driven this stretch of the road to the accompaniment of dolphins in the surf:

More of the scenery along the main freeway/highway:

Some of you may be aware of my other hobby - poker! Well, up in the area is a smallish casino that I thought I would try out. The casino (Chumash Casino) is about 11 miles off the freeway. to get there I *had* to drive beautiful roads:

And through the Danish town of Solvang:

Solvang is a Danish community (largely tourism now) with architecture and names to match.

As far as yesterday's run - 9 miles general aerobic around the Upper Back Bay. Average pace was 9:50, and average heart rate was 81% of max. On tap today - rest. Oh - and the poker? Broke even after six hours of playing. So just a so so day. Tough to win when you have to fold Q-Q to flushes and straights!

Recovery Day

Yesterday was a recovery day. I put in a four mile recovery run. I was seriously considering bagging it, but I did it anyways. It seems that just to get out and put in four miles and not letting my heart rate go over 75% of max is not a very exciting way to spend an afternoon. At that heart rate I am barely moving along at times. So, when I got back, I went to the books ("Advanced Marathoning" by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas) to remember why I'm doing these short, seemingly junk runs:




So there you have it. I guess they are important after all!

Speaking of books, I've given up on the Glover book ("Competitive Runner's Handbook"). It's not the book itself, it's me. Well, maybe it is the book. The problem is I've read this all before in various other books with better descriptions of why these things are important. My impression of the Glover book is he tells you what you need to do, but doesn't do a very good job of explaining why. Kind of like being lectured. When it comes right down to it, "Advanced Marathoning" gets my vote for the best running book out there - even if you aren't going to run a marathon. Pfitzinger and Douglass go into a lot of detail to explain why things are important, providing tools that us runners can use to make decisions when we are playing around with our training plans.

Today is Friday, which means rest day (seems like I've done a lot of that this week). It also means it's Foto Friday over at Adventure Seeker's blog. Since spring is under way (although some would disagree), I though I would leave you with skiing in Southern California as a reminder of all that snow you Easterners had this year. Talk to you Sunday!