Kung Hey Fat Choi!

What a glorious day. The sun is shining, I’ve just returned from two great runs, a coffee chat and a big brunch. Now I just have to take the dog for a walk and Elle to swimming lessons and the day will be perfect.
It is days like this where I truly miss living in British Columbia because every Sunday is like today or at least if it is raining you can still go out for your run without bundling up and attempting to cope with -30 plus wind chill. I hope one day I stop complaining about the East Coast cold, but alas, not today.
Before I get too far: Happy Chinese New Year/Kung Hey Fat Choi everyone. Belle deserves a few extra ear scratches today to celebrate the official start to the year of the dog. As far as I’m concerned each year is a year of the dog around this house but I can’t fault her for that.
Today was a great day for running. Ricky stayed over last night with Lisa and Elle in Bouctouche and we got up and ran 8.5K to the RR. I specifically told him that we were going to start out slowly. By Adams Street, I yelled up to him, “Hey when I said we were going to start slowly, I meant slowly for us not, Meb or Deena Kastor.” Rick is famous for picking up the pace quickly, so I made sure to hold him back in the early going. We made it to the RR in 39:22 with splits of: 4:43, 4:42, 4:37, 4:35, 4:41, 4:42, 4:35, 4:31, 2:12.
Once we arrived we immediately turned around and ran another 3K with the group. It was a great pace, finishing in 17:05. According to the Garmin, my splits were: 5:33, 5:34, 5:54. Think about it, four weeks ago, the group did 3.3K in 25:29. If someone tries to argue that there hasn’t been a massive improvement from everybody, I may just laugh at them. Ok, I probably wouldn’t do that. But any impartial analysis of the split times since we started shows that each person has made considerable progress. And their lowly instructor has never felt better.
That said I fiddled with something inside my Garmin and now it says my max HR is 30 beats lower than it should be, so our nice and easy run today hit 84 per cent of my max HR and the run with Rick was 100 per cent of my max HR. Something is definitely screwy. I know I was playing in an area I shouldn’t be last night but I thought I deleted all of my changes. Oops.