3/30/10

Tuesday’s Training – Am: 70 mins easy Pm: 45 mins slow

Mileage - 16 Miles

I was feeling pretty tired this morning and the conditions didn’t help to make me feel any better. I drove to the gym and ran from there, heading out along to the train tracks to see just how far the dirt road that follows the track went. I did a few strides in the run to try and waken up my legs a bit but to no avail, today was going to be slow. The wind today was very strong so no matter which way I was going to run, I was going to have to hit a headwind at some point.

The wind in Flagstaff is notoriously strong at this time of year. Even at 8am it will be 30 mph so we always have to plan the training accordingly. Once I got back from the run I emailed Greg to say that I wanted to go ahead and do the planned training session of 8*1 mile but to just do it on Lake Mary Rd instead of the track in Sedona. This means that we can get there in the morning and see which way the wind is blowing and then start the run from either end of the road.

The rest of the day was spent napping and lounging to see if I would feel any better on my second run of the day. This was fine as I managed to reply to a lot of emails and get some work done. I was feeling increasingly tired and the sound of the wind outside wasn’t helping that. I wanted to get motivated so I watched a bunch of videos that were made of the top American runners before the Olympic marathon trials and that helped a bit. I got changed and headed out to the trail (just 30 meters from our front door) that leads up to Buffalo Park. I was pushed all the way up the hill by a strong tail wind but this only meant that at the top of the trail that I would be running against the wind the whole way back. The wind was probably a good thing as it meant that I kept the run very slow (I really didn’t have a choice as I was feeling so tired) and it ended up just being a short recovery run. I got some drills and strides done after the run and I felt good for those for some reason. I was just trying to wake my legs up and it seemed to work.

I thought Julie would have been home by now but she wasn’t so I made up a burrito from the leftovers we had and waited for Julie (we had a meeting to go to at 6.30pm). She still wasn’t at the house at 6.30pm so I went by her work and found her there still attending to a patient. We left her work and headed to our meeting and as I sat in the meeting, the tiredness set in again. My legs felt like jelly and because the room was hot, I was starting to get sleepy. After we were done, we caught up with a friend of ours who had just run 36 miles through the Grand Canyon at the weekend in preparation for an assault on the rim to rim to rim record in 4 weeks. He’s seriously crazy! That’s over 6 hours of gruelling pounding straight up and down the canyon. I think we’re going to go out for dinner with him and his wife next week before I head back to the UK so that should be nice.

My mum had sent over some books that I had ordered a while ago so a night of reading in bed is on the cards before bed time.