Making My Runs Fit My Schedule

I had a customer meeting this morning in Columbia, MD.  I also had a 6 mile run scheduled for this morning as well.

For those of you who live in the DC area or have visited here, traffic gets pretty bad the later you hit the road, so hitting the gym at 5:45am here in Gaithersburg and then getting on the road after 7am was not going to be the best plan traffic wise.

I checked to see if there were any Bally Fitness clubs closer to Columbia, MD - or at least on the way - and I found that there was one in Greenbelt, MD...cool!  I went to that Bally's early this morning and avoided much of the morning volume traffic (there was a fender bender right before getting onto the Beltway which slowed me down considerably...oh well!).

The Bally's in Greenbelt was quite different than the one I go to in Gaithersburg.  First of all, this one has an indoor pool and a boxing ring (pretty cool stuff!).  Also, there was a noticeable difference in the racial makeup of the clientele - in Gaithersburg, the clientele is about 80% white while in Greenbelt it was about 20% white.  The most obvious difference that the racial makeup impacted was the music - in Gaithersburg they blast techno music through the PA system and in Greenbelt it was more Hip-Hop and R&B.  I like the Hip-Hop and R&B better than techno, but I still listened to my iPod on my run (see below).

I once again did a Yasso 800s interval run.  My 6 800 splits were:  4:18, 17, 20, 19, 21, 20.  I ran the intervals faster this morning than I did last week and my heart rate showed it.  My heart rate hit the 170s towards the end of the second interval (I think I didn't get there until the 5th interval last week), however, I was controlled enough to not get into the 180s.

As for music, I stayed with the 80s - this time listening to albums instead of a random mix.  I started with The Talking Heads "Little Creatures" and then listened to Styx "Paradise Theater" (link is to Amazon...for some reason this is not in iTunes).  "Paradise Theater" was actually the first CD I ever purchased!  It was most likely in 1987 or so - I had owned a cassette of "Paradise Theater" and listened to it so much that I wore it out, so it went to the top of my list of CDs to purchase once I bought a CD player.  Interesting that back then there was some planning involved in purchasing music...you thought about what you were going to purchase and then had to go to a record store to purchase it (remember Kemp Mill Records and Waxie Maxies?).  Or even better, you could avoid the store and order the music through the BMG or Columbia House mail-in "clubs".  Now there's iTunes.  You can purchase singles songs (no B-sides), listen to a sample of the music before buying it and get them instantly.  Amazing how much of a transformation has occurred in this business over the past 5 years...