4/6/10

Tuesday’s Training – Am: 24*200m with 200m rec. Pm: 66 mins easy

Mileage – 22 Miles

Martin and I drove down to Sedona for the workout this morning. Martin was just running easily s he has his workout but with the wind being lower in Sedona and the temperature higher, he wanted to run down there instead of suffering through a run in Flagstaff. We got to the track around 9am and got our usual warm up run in. As I went through my warm up drills and strides while Martin ran around the track. For some reason I felt fine on the drills but just not really up for a speed workout as I knew it was something I hadn’t done for a while and I knew I wasn’t going to be that good at it as this stage of my training. I took the first 3 reps pretty easy and then averaged around 31 secs for the rest of the workout. This was a strange feeling as I have been doing this workout since I was 16 and have always been able to run 30 secs for all the reps. I guess that’s marathon training for you! The wind couldn’t decide which way it was going to blow today so I kept having to change the direction of my reps. There was also another athlete at the track going through some hurdle drills very nicely and it was only once I was going for my warm down that I realised it was Dominique Arnold who has the USA 110m hurdle record of 12.90. I think he retired a few years ago so I guess he was just going through the paces again.

When I got back to the house I fell asleep for 2 hours. It felt so good to get a nice long nap and get some good recovery for my second run. I had some coffee and popped down to the post office before heading out the door and up to Buffalo Park for the run. Needless to say that it was windy again but I am really getting used to it now on the route that I take. It pushes me up the hill at the start and then knocks me back from the 0.4 to 1.5 mile mark of the 2 mile loop and then I am against it for the 2 miles back to the apartment. I was doing 10 miles for the evening run and so I started off very easy and then after 4 miles picked the pace up every 2 miles until I was running at a really good pace. This was the best way to do it as I was still feeling a little sluggish after my nap. It meant that I felt great striding down the trail to finish off the run although I couldn’t really take my mind off how sore my hands were as I had forgot to put gloves on and the wind froze them up. Julie got home just after me and we quickly had some left overs before heading out to a meeting we had.

We got to bed nice and early which felt great as I was already getting tired when we got back from our meeting.