Wednesday: 9.68 km, average page 7:06/km
Thursday: the Meridian Park Five, 5.41 km/41:40 time
Saturday: 6.48 km, average pace 7:07/km
Sunday: 19.14 km, average pace 7:16/km

After pushing it last week, I wanted to focus on running this week. It was very difficult, made possible by the scorching humidity (hitting about 78 on the dew point scale), but it was good.

Part of my early training is starting to switch my brain from miles to kilometers. We Americans do love our miles and feet but the rest of the world decided to go metric a while back. The Maraton is 42km, which is a nice and easy number to think about instead of 26.2. For those who don’t remember high school math (like me)

one mile = 1.609344 kilometers.

Thus, the timing is off for my American brain. I ran into this on my Sunday long run. I kept thinking once I hit 10 that I had three more km to go until I hit my goal of nearly 12 miles. That happy thought caused me to slow down a bit until I realized that oh wait, this is the metric system and I was only half-way. And it was really hot. (Did I mention it was really hot last week?)

I’m averaging anywhere from 6:15-6:50 a km which is great but it still averages out to about 10:15 a mile. I’m trying to get faster but this past week was a challenge because after 9 am, the humidity was in full force. No matter, it’s winter in Argentina…

I kick it back in with running and Crossfit this week. Mercifully, the humidity will be much lower this week and the end of the week should be downright delightful.

I also incorporated what I call the Meridian Hill Park Five. Meridian Hill Park is near my house and one of the gems of D.C. The Park is split by upper and lower tiers and it’s both beautiful and a great place to workout during the day.

The MHP5 is real simple: Run the outer perimeter of the upper tier down the stairs to the outer perimeter of the lower tier and back up to the upper tier. Make that quasi-loop five times. Intermittently, do 25 bench push ups, 25 squats, 25 jumping jacks, 25 bench step ups and 10 burpees.

Easy, breezy.

My goal is to do that in 30 minutes. I got to 41 minutes because, well, it was hot and I needed to water. And I think I had a pebble in my shoe for a moment, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.