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Tonight’s track workout with the JSRC was tough, but it was a good kind of tough. Part of the challenge was the heat which was still in the low 80s at 6pm. The other was short recoveries. Those short recoveries made it hard to maintain effort throughout the intervals.

Also, coming into the workout my legs were a bit fatigued from P90X Legs and Back on Monday and running trails yesterday, but I was able to loosen them up pretty good during a 2.5-mile warmup.

Here is a breakdown of the workout…

• Warmup + 6 x 100m stride outs
• 800m f (300m recovery)
• 400m f (1-min recovery)
• 800m f (400m recovery)
• 1200m Straights and Curves (1-min recovery)
• 600m f (200m recovery)
• 300m f (1-min recovery)
• 600m f (cool down)

With warmup and cool down my total was 7.2 miles completed. By far the toughest part for me was going from 1200m straights and curves directly into a 600m with only a 1-min static recovery. However, I was able to maintain fairly consistent splits all the way to end, and am pretty happy with my overall pacing.

Just like last week, I ran this entire workout with Nathan McCall who has made incredible progress since joining our club last fall. Unlike me (adult onset runner), Nathan was a 4-year collegiate runner at Appalachian State, so I’m expecting that pretty soon he will be lapping me during the workouts 🙂 …In the meantime it has been great to have someone else running at my same pace the last two weeks.

Beast Mode…ON!

Today I returned to the trails for the first time since running in southern Honduras on our mission trip. It was a nice change of pace from all of my recent road running and I hope to get back into a normal routine of incorporating trails at least once per week.

My schedule called for 50-minutes easy and 4 x 100m stride outs. Of the three main trails in Percy and Edwin Warner Parks, only the red is long enough to occupy 50 minutes since it is 4.5 miles. It would take two laps on either the white or the blue trails because they are only 2.5 miles each.

My legs were really sore heading into this run from doing P90X Legs and Back on Monday night for the first time in two weeks. Overall it didn’t have a big impact on the effort, but was something I could feel for the first half of the run. For the run I kept the pace very conservative with with a steady progression from a first mile of 12:23 to a final mile of 10:27. The red trail has a total elevation gain of almost 1,200 ft in only 4.5 miles, so needless to say this is a challenging route. However, I felt pretty good throughout, even on the tough climbs, and really enjoyed being back on the trails in the beautiful Percy Warner Park.

At the end I completed the 4 x 100m stride outs on the main drive near the trail head. It felt weird to run strides in trail shoes, but I was still able to crank them out at a 6:35 average pace.

Beast Mode…ON!

Guinness Book of World Records recognizes surfer Garrett McNamara of Haleiwa, Hawaii for riding a 78-foot wave off the coast of Portugal in November 2011. I certainly don’t know the first thing about surfing, but this video just looks sick. I can’t imagine even being in the water with a wave that big much less trying to navigate a surfboard though it. Must Watch!

Nathan and I had been talking recently about shaking up our normal running routes, so today we just kind of made it up as we went along through the streets of Belle Meade. My schedule called for 65 to 75 minutes at easy pace, and we started off with a first mile in the 9:30s. My legs felt a little tired at the start after doing P90X Legs and Back last night with Olivia, but they felt better with every mile, and felt really good at the end.

Our pace steadily increased throughout the run and landed in the 8:20s and 8:30s for the final 4.5-miles of our 8.5-mile total. It was fun to just make random turns down unfamiliar roads to see where they would lead. This strategy brought us to one stretch where it felt like we were going uphill for a LONG way, but overall was very enjoyable. The only downside to this ad-lib route was that we reached the 75-minute mark with about a half a mile to go back to our cars.

Not wanting to break my schedule from John, I decided to walk the rest of the way back to my car, and encouraged Nathan to keep running if he wanted. However, he also decided to walk and we both enjoyed a nice cool down stroll on Belle Mead Boulevard that felt pretty nice. Great way to start off a day.

Beast Mode…ON!

Sammy Wanjiru’s death still a mystery by Shaun Assael – ESPN The Magazine

Let’s just say that this morning’s run was a little more interesting than we had planned.

The schedule called for 50 minutes easy with 4 x 100m stride outs at the end. Nathan and I met at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center and did most of the run through the park and on the Harpeth River Greenway. As expected my legs felt a little creaky at the beginning after the hilly run through Percy Warner on Saturday. This steadily improved throughout the run, though our splits were pretty chill from start to finish. It was nice to enjoy a very easy recovery run until…. 

On our way back to the cars it became apparent that we would be about 5-minutes short of our 50-minute goal, so Nathan suggested we cross Hwy 100 and run a few minutes on Harpeth Bend road before returning to the park. When we came to Hwy 100, the traffic was so thick it appeared as though it would take a while to cross. As an alternate plan, Nathan suggested that we run through the Ensworth High School campus which is next door to Edwin Warner Park.

For those of you outside of Nashville, Ensworth represents the pinnacle of elitism with an annual tuition that is more than many private colleges. As a matter of fact it actually looks much more like a college campus than a secondary school. When we started running through the entrance I joked that we would probably be setting off motion and heat sensors and Nathan fired back that there were probably snipers watching us.

I suggested that we follow the lower drive which is well away from the main buildings so as not to look suspicious. As we were running through there I noticed a small parking lot and said “I wonder who they make park all the way down here…it must be the house elves (reference to Harry Potter).”

Just as we passed through the parking lot we came to their athletic fields and decided to turn back for the park. Right after turning we saw that a Hummer H3 was headed our direction. It quickly stopped and a security guard jumped out (why does a high school need Hummers for their security guards?). He asked if we attended school there (I’m 37 ???). When we said “no” he said that we were trespassing on private property and had been reported to security by someone at the school. What was surprising to me was that we had only been on that lower road for about 2 minutes.

He then said that our being on campus represented a “liability issue” and we needed to leave immediately. I told him that we were simply cutting through on a run and would head back to where we came from. He told us that going back that way would take too long and we needed to go past the athletic fields out onto Hwy 100 (really pleasant guy). Though I didn’t want to go onto Hwy 100, we obliged and headed back to the park along the highway.

As we passed back by the entrance to Ensworth next to the park, the Hummer H3 was parked right by the entrance with the security guard enjoying a smoke. I assume he wanted to doubly make sure we did not come back onto the school property. I waved at him as we passed by back into the park.

After the 50 minutes was completed we did 4 x 100m stride outs on the greenway back to our cars. Our average pace for the 50 minutes was just over 9:00 per mile, and the average pace for the strides was 5:58. Other than our little adventure at Ensworth, it was a pretty enjoyable run.

Beast Mode…ON!

By far the most common way we hear it pronounced is either “Aggie” or “UhGee” as both mentioned below. Also, when I was in high school they engraved my name on the inside of my class ring as “Agree” just like Nikky said.

Congrats to everyone who had it right, and thanks for reading!!

Love the Agagee name 🙂

Not Agree? People mispronounce my last name all the time. Guerney, Gernsey….crazy.

I was saying UhGee in my head. Agagee is funny. 🙂

sweet, I got it right!

I was right:)

I had the vowels right, but had been using a hard “g” in my head.

Haha… okay, I’ve been pronouncing your name wrong this whole time. Well, I learned something new today!

Also, I’d been pronouncing it “aggie.” So totally wrong. 🙂

Since my Tumblr ID is “TeamAgee,” and this blog is named “Running with Team Agee” I started wondering how many people who follow the blog actually know how to pronounce our last name, Agee?

Even though it is very short, I would estimate that at least 75% of people pronounce it incorrectly the first time. Here is the proper pronunciation:

• agee is pronounced as ai – j ee where, 
• ai is pronounced as ai in pain
• j is pronounced as j in jug
• ee is pronounced as ee in see

Another way to think about it is to simply say these two letters in sequence:

• A … G

After my wife and I were first married, and she changed her last name, she soon realized that whenever she provided her last name to make a purchase or complete some type of registration, she would also need to spell it. She got in the habit of just saying “My name is Olivia Agee, A..G..E..E.” After she had been doing this for a while, we started getting mail to our apartment addressed to Olivia Agagee, because people hearing her thought she had been spelling the whole time and never actually said her last name.

Probably the most famous person with this last name was the American author and screenwriter James Agee. You can hear his name pronounced by going HERE.

So who had it right?

Friday

After a hard effort at track last night, today’s scheduled 50 minute run was a very, very easy shakeout run through Bellevue in my Saucony Hattoris. The weather was awesome with sunny skies and temps in the low 50s. This felt very nice after the hot conditions last week and early this week.

As the run started my legs and ankles felt pretty achey, so I kept everything extremely chill with an initial mile of 10:15. Slowly the aches and soreness began to leave my legs and the run ended with things feeling much better than when I started. I guess this is the sign of an effective shakeout effort. Overall I got in just over 5 miles in the 50 minutes with an average pace of 9:48 per mile. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I’m guessing this is one of my slowest runs of the year (if not the slowest).

Saturday

Our group run this morning consisted of the 11.2-mile main drive through Percy Warner Park. This is a busy day for the park because of the annual Steeplechase horse race (which is more of a socialite / partying event than a race), and we were hoping to be able to run by the course before the crowds started rolling in.

My schedule called for 12 to 14-miles at an easy pace, and I was initially hoping to land in the upper part of this range by adding a little extra before or after the group run. The temps were again very mild with overcast skies and temps in the mid 50s. I was only able to get in about a 1/4 mile before the group started, but just figured I would add a little bit to the end.

Our pace started off very easy and we slowly picked it up throughout the run with some fluctuation due to the significant elevation changes (a single loop of the 11.2 has a cumulative 1,500 ft of elevation gain). My overall pace for the run was 8:45 per mile with a range from 10:10 at the start to 7:54 at the finish. Throughout the run my legs felt very good, even when going up some of the more significant climbs. However, even though my legs felt great, I could tell that my body was tired and I decided to not try and push the run to 14-miles. I added just a bit to the end of the group run to finish with 12-miles total and am happy with the decision to not keep going.

Right now I’m in the middle of a couple of easy recovery weeks before John and I get started on more targeted training for the Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon in October. For some reason this has put me in a bit of a reflective mood. My total mileage was just under 44-miles on an “easy” week, and that made think back to when I first started running. I remember the first official running goal I set was to complete 10-miles over 3-weeks. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined running 44-miles in a week, much less 50, or 60+.

Beast Mode…ON!

Since I felt so bad during my 50 minute, easy paced run yesterday, it was great to have an awesome track workout tonight with the JSRC. After a 2-mile warmup and 6 x 100m stride outs we did…

• 4 x 200m fresh (100) [400]
• 800m good (400)
• 4 x 200m / infield recovery / timed intervals – 66 seconds (400)^
• 800m Straights and Curves (300)
• 800m good (cooldown)

^For these we run 200m on the track, then recovery across the midfield point of the infield. Each interval (run + recovery) is supposed to be executed in a set amount of time between 65 and 90 seconds. For me tonight the time was 66 seconds for all 4 repeats. This was 40 seconds for the 200m with 26 second recovery across the grass. All intervals are done continuous.

I ran the warmup and all the intervals tonight with Nathan McCall who has been running with our group since last fall. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Nathan, and it was fun to run with him tonight. We took turns leading interval laps and were able to maintain fairly consistent splits throughout. Even with a pretty hard effort, I felt really good all the way to the end, which was a big confidence boost after the crummy day yesterday.

With a 1-mile cool down, my total mileage for the night was just over 7.5-miles. Tomorrow’s schedule calls for 50 minutes at an easy pace followed by 12 to 14-miles easy on Saturday.

Beast Mode…ON!

P.S. After tonight’s workout I retired another pair of Saucony Kinvara 2s just as they reached 400 total miles. I know lots of runners have problems with durability on the Kinvara and Kinvara 2, but this has definitely not been the case with me. These shoes have taken me through 2 marathons and 2 half marathons along with a lot of training miles on the road. Probably could get a few more miles out of them had I not worn holes in the top of the toe-box just over my big toes. Still have one pair of Kinvara and one pair of Kinvara 2s in my current rotation along with one more pair of Kinvara 2s still in the box. Also can’t wait to try the new Kinvara 3. Find Your Strong!

Updated Race Results and Personal Records (PR)

Recap of the 37th annual One America 500 Festival Mini-Marathon in Indianapolis, IN

One America 500 Festival Mini Marathon 
May 5, 2012
www.500festival.com/marathon/

My Run:  Overall, the One America 500 Festival Mini-Marathon (“the Mini”) in Indianapolis was my 12th half marathon. This was the fourth year in a row that I have run the Mini, which is the largest half marathon and fifth largest road race in the U.S. with 35,000 runners.  The Mini is part of the month-long 500 Festival that leads up to the Indianapolis 500.

Well….today’s planned 18-holes at Hampton Cove in Huntsville was again a washout. So our 3-day, 72-hole golf trip turned into a 3-day, 46-hole golf trip. However, we still had a good time and I was able able to get in my scheduled 50-minute easy run earlier than expected this afternoon once I got home.

I decided to run in my Saucony Hattoris because I had not used them since last Wednesday. Overall I would say this was the worst I’ve felt on a run in a while, though it was kind of up and down throughout.

The first 10 minutes I felt tired, my legs were stiff, and my pace hovered around 9:30. I’m guessing this had something to do with playing 36-holes of golf yesterday followed by a 60 minute run. I briefly thought about just turning around and running home, but decided to give it a few more minutes to see if things improved. Well, they did improve dramatically for the next 20 minutes, and my pace dropped into the 8:20s. Then…BAM…I started feeling tired again and for the next 20 minutes my pace slowed back toward 9:00. Finally, I felt pretty good during the last 10 minutes and my pace dropped back down toward 8:30.

Looking back a few hours later I know that I was already tired when I started the run. Also, when I think back through my day, the only fluid I had consumed prior to the run was caffeinated coffee and iced tea. Not exactly good hydration for an afternoon run with full sun and temps in the mid 70s.

Whatever the case, the run is in the books and tomorrow will be another day.

Beast Mode…ON!

After 36-holes of golf followed by dinner, we did not get back to our hotel last night until 8:30pm. This pushed the start of my run to almost 9:00pm. My schedule called for 60 to 70 minutes at easy pace and I was determined to find some places to run around our hotel that did not include strip mall parking lots. I ended up finding a pretty good stretch of road along with running around the main drive of a very large business. Since I was already tired from golf the first 30 minutes was a very chill 8:40ish pace, and I felt pretty good once I got warmed up. Unfortunately after the first 30 minutes it started storming and I was forced to head indoors for the hotel dreadmill. While this was not pleasant I did feel really good for the remainder of the run and slowly increased my pace from 8:30 to 7:30. Overall I ran for just over 61 minutes for a total of 7.3 miles. We are now on the road headed north to Hampton Cove in Huntsville for one final 18 on our golf trip before heading home. Beast Mode…ON!

This morning my dad and I, along with our friends Mike and Ricky, headed south to Alabama for a 3-day golf trip on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. After getting rained out in Muscle Shoals after 10 holes we headed further south to Birmingham for the night.

Since I couldn’t get my run in this morning I had to get it in after dinner. There are not a lot of options around our hotel so I spent most of the run in the parking lots of various strip malls in the area. While this was not ideal it was much better than resorting to the hotel dreadmill.

This was my first run since the 500 Festival Mini Marathon on Saturday, and my schedule called for 50 minutes at easy pace. It was still pretty warm and humid at the start and I felt fairly sluggish for the first 30 minutes of the run. My average pace for those miles was around 8:30. For the last 20 minutes I started feeling much better and my pace picked up significantly including a final mile of 7:18. My overall average was 8:16 per mile.

Glad to have this run in the books and pleased with how good I felt during the last 20 minutes. Tomorrow we are supposed to play 36-holes at Oxmoor Valley, and my running schedule calls for 70 minutes at easy pace. Should be interesting.

Beast Mode…ON!

I was finally able to look up my official stats from the 500 Festival Mini Marathon this morning in Indianapolis.

My time was 1:31:28 which was 418th overall out 31,129 finishers (top 1.3%). As I said earlier my goal had been to break 1:28, but that was before the forecast of higher than normal heat and humidity. The humidity ended up being 95% at the start and 81% at the finish, and was a huge factor in the race. Considering these conditions I’m ecstatic with my time and especially with getting the special “500 Club” medal for the first time.

In addition to this it was a fun trip with my wife Olivia and good friend Paxton. I love running road trips!

Well, tonight I went a little bit off the reservation. After starting to feel better on Tuesday, John had advised me to do all easy runs for the remainder of the week leading up to the 500 Festival Mini Marathon on Saturday. Tonight was supposed to be 4 to 6 miles easy and 4 x 100m stride outs. However I had planned on asking John at track tonight if I could get in 2 to 3 miles at goal race pace with an easy warmup and cool down. When I arrived at Vanderbilt I learned that John would not be there so I just made the executive decision to proceed with my alternate plan.

I have not done a race pace run since last Tuesday morning and have run a lot of easy miles since then. I know it would have been better to do any race pace work earlier in the week, but I really wanted to feel that faster pace again before Saturday. So, I ended up doing a 1.3-mile warmup followed by 3 continuous miles on the track at goal race pace and then a 1-mile cool down.

The 3-miles at race pace were at a 6:41 average and felt good and fairly relaxed. I mentioned yesterday that I could tell my energy level was down after being sick, but the run did not feel like that tonight. However after downloading my Garmin, my heart rate was a bit higher than I was expecting and even higher that what it reached during my 4-mile race pace run last Tuesday. I think a lot of this has to do with the warmer temperatures and humidity, though the conditions are probably going to be even worse on Saturday for the race. I’m thinking that I may start off with a pace around 6:50 on Saturday and then just take it by feel from there based on the conditions.

Beast Mode…ON!

It looks like it is definitely going to be a HOT one for the 500 Festival Mini Marathon in Indianapolis on Saturday with Olivia and my friend Paxton. The forecast just is not relenting. I’m trying to figure out how much I need to adjust my goal to accomodate these conditions. With good weather I was hoping to break 1:28, now I have no idea what to expect.

After missing Monday and Tuesday with a bad head-cold, it was good to get back on the road this morning. My legs felt good after the marathon on Saturday, but my cold just exploded on Sunday and I ended up spending most of the day in the bed after morning worship at Bellevue Church of Christ. On Monday I stayed in bed until after 10am and didn’t go into work until after lunch. I started feeling better on Tuesday, but John advised me to take that day off as well since there wasn’t much to be gained before the 500 Festival Mini Marathon on Saturday.

For the rest of the week, John has me doing easy runs of various distances with 4 x 100m stride outs. Today’s schedule called for 4-miles and I was joined by my friend Paxton running through the streets of Bellevue. I ran in my Saucony Hattoris and we kept the pace very easy which was good because the humidity was crazy even at 6:30am. I was drenched after the run. Overall my legs felt fantastic, but I could tell that my energy level was down a bit from being sick. Hopefully this will come around before the race on Saturday.

We finished with stride outs in the church parking lot, and it felt pretty good to run fast. I’m a bit worried about the forecast for the race on Saturday which is calling for highs in the mid 80s and humidity over 70%. If this turns out to be the case, I’m definitely going to have to dial back my expectations.

Awesome times, but you need a more recent 10k as that PR is way out of line with the rest now. Quest for 39:59?? 🙂

Ha…yeah I guess that one is a little inconsistent. I’ve only run one 10k so far out of my 34 races, and that one was 10 min after I finished a 5k (my current 5k PR). I suppose I need to add another 10k or 2 to my schedule. 🙂