158 LostTrailRunner Podcast

This is Thursday, November 28th, and it's Thanksgiving, so Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Come on.

Come on. Music. This is Thanksgiving and this is episode 158 of the Lost Trailrunner podcast. Music.

Bad news for me, but hopefully not as bad as it could be. At the end of October, I went to the dermatologist, and he found an area on the top of my head and my scalp that looked suspicious, so he did a biopsy. And on the 13th of November, he called me and said that it was melanoma, which is not good. So I'm scheduled to get that cut off the top of my head on December the 13th, which is a Friday.

Friday the 13th, which is not good. But the nurse to talk to, she said, well, we're not going to make Friday the 13th a bad day. Okay. Okay, so hopefully it was just a discolored area on the top of my head and wasn't very big, so hopefully it won't be as bad as it could be. Anyway, I've decided that I'm just going to press on regardless and see what happens. So they're going to remove it on the 13th of December, and then we'll go from there.

But in the meantime, I'll have to go through what I've been doing in my training for no particular race. Just running. How's that? But as you know, I've been using this 80-20 5K training program for a while. And I'm doing a lot better with it because in the past, whenever I got to a speed workout, I would just kind of change it and do another easy run. Same amount of time, but just not the intensity that I should be doing.

And I've switched that to actually doing the workout I'm supposed to be doing. And I'm back into my second week of the new plan. And I've done two fartlek workouts. The first one was 20 seconds fast with a minute and 40 second recovery, you know, slow jog run for six repetitions. And the one I did this last week was six repetitions of a minute with a two-minute recovery. So I did both of those. Plus, another day of the week, I had what's called a fast finish run where it's just a zone two run.

But on the end, the last five minutes was in zone three. And tomorrow, Friday, this is Thanksgiving, by the way, Friday is another one of those fast finish runs, but the fast finish is 10 minutes instead of five minutes. So I've been kind of sticking with those. And I believe our last podcast I mentioned, I got some Nike Zoom Fly 6s, and those have really been a good shoe so far. I've only done about four runs in them, but each run has been a good one.

And they have a carbon plate in them, and I think the heel-to-toe drop is like 8 millimeters. I'm a lot more comfortable with 5 or 6, but 8's okay. I can't run in a shoe that's got a 10 millimeter drop, but those Nike Zoom Fly 6s, they're turning in to be probably one of my best training shoes.

I also, my last Bartlett run, which was the day before yesterday, I wore my Saucony Endorphin Pro 3s, which are carbon-plated race shoe, which since I'm not running any races, I just use them for a fast workout. And my fast workouts aren't that fast, as you know, but they're fast for me nowadays.

And hopefully I can keep this training up and I'll have to tell you that when the doctor told me that I had melanoma on the top of my head that's kind of depressing, you know because melanoma is I think the worst kind of skin cancer you can have and sometimes it's aggressive, I guess, and sometimes it's not it was just a little discolored area on the top of my scalp And he said, this looks suspicious. We're going to take a biopsy of it. So he's a good dermatologist.

So maybe he's got it before it did any real damage, hopefully. And if not, then I'll just have to deal with it. So we'll see how it goes. As I said, tomorrow I'm going to be doing a fast finish workout with a 10-minute fast finish in Zone 3. And hopefully the weather will be decent. Today, Thanksgiving Day here, was supposed to be a rainy day and it never did rain and the sun was out. When I went and ran this afternoon, it was like 58.

I think it was 58 degrees. The sun was out. The only thing was the wind was blowing about 13. I think the forecast said 13 miles an hour with gusts of 26, which still wasn't bad I mean with the temperature being up in that range it was okay, So I don't have any races scheduled any time in the near future, and I need to schedule one to give me something to aim for. So probably with me having that procedure done on the 13th of December, I don't know.

It's just like a localized procedure. They just said they just numb the top of my head. So hopefully I'll be able to run and not miss any days because of that. We'll see how that goes. But I'd like to do some kind of a race the first part of January. In the past, I used to always go to Disney and run either the marathon or the half marathon, but I haven't done that. I think I quit running the marathon in 1999, so that's 25 years ago.

It doesn't seem that long ago, and I think the last half I did at Disney was in 2011, and that's a long time ago, too, and I don't know. Probably the last half marathon I ran was probably one of Jeff Galloway's, And it was maybe, I don't know, 2018, maybe. I don't know. I haven't even looked.

I'm not even going to worry about it. Galloway weekend that I did, I just did the 5K because I'm just not in the mood to train for halves and such right now. The longest race I would be doing would be 10K. As you get older, you seem to work your way down in distance, even though everybody that you know is doing marathons and seeing how good they're doing and they're improving. When you're my age, you aren't improving. You're just kind of dealing with it and trying to enjoy yourself.

And that's what I'm doing. I'm not worried about speed anymore. I think the last 5K I did do was that trail race at Chattahoochee Point. And I think I ran like a 40.04, which is I think the year before I ran a 37 there.

So but then again i had had that crash on the trail and i hadn't been running and i really wasn't in shape and all that stuff so i'd like to get back to at least in the 30s for my 5ks, and from the the speed that i've been doing my intervals on these fartleks it looks like i can probably do that because it seemed to be running fairly easy hitting i think i looked on garmin connect and one of my intervals was even in like

650 range which is a shock to me i had i haven't to run that fast in a long, long time. Usually the fastest I'll get an interval of, you know, a section will be in the eights maybe.

So we'll see how it goes. Anyway, this is going to be a really short podcast, but at least I've put one out. So I'll talk to you next time, and maybe I'll have some results of this procedure on the top of my head. see ya. Music. Hey thanks for listening to today's podcast we'll be here next time keep the emails coming in and be sure to subscribe. Music.