4/7/10

Wednesday’s Training – Am: 87 mins very easy Pm: 40 mins easy

Mileage – 18 Miles

I had a good nights sleep after going to bed early last night so I was hoping to feel really good today. I headed out to the Campbell Mesa trail again as surprise surprise, it was really windy again! I got off to a really slow start as the trailhead is uphill into the wind and I basically kept this pace for the rest of the run. This was my original idea as I have a hard workout tomorrow and I needed to recover from yesterday. It was nice just to plug in my ipod and just shuffle along for close to an hour and a half. I was still being blown about but I really wasn’t too bothered as I was pretty switched off. I need some days like this so that I can have lots of energy for the next day. It actually felt like a track season easy day. The hardest part was actually doing my drills after the run as I was being blown about the road. From the trail I headed over to the shops to pick up a few groceries before heading home to make some scrambled eggs with ham, mushrooms and red peppers and some fresh French loaf that I bought. It really filled me up so I would need a little while to digest the food before napping so I made a call to my coach in Scotland, Prof. Ron Morrison and my former FSU team and house mate, Luke Gunn (he and his girlfriend Hannah England are up in Mammoth Lakes doing some pre track season training). I was good to catch up with both of them and talk training for a little while. Once I got off of the calls, I fell right asleep and woke up an hour later.

After playing around on the computer for quite a while, I finally got out to do my second run. As usual I headed up the trail to Buffalo Park as I was just doing an easy 6 miles. Right when I got to the start of the park I met some old steeplechase rivals and stopped and talked to them for a while (Pieter Desmet of Belgium and Ben Bruce of the Oregon track team). They’re both opening up their season at the next Stanford meet and I must say I was little jealous that I wouldn’t be hitting the track again for a long while. After talking to them for about 5 minutes I headed back off on my run and it went by pretty quickly. It was still windy but I was really just switching my mind off for the run so I didn’t notice it too much. I got back and did some drills, strides and stretching and then quickly got showered and changed and drove to Julie’s work to pick her up as we were going over Picazzo’s to meet some friends for dinner.

We had a lovely dinner with my RCIA friend Jason Wolfe (the nutter who is running the Rim to Rim to Rim of the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks) and his wife, Aerie and their 2 little kids. The kids were really funny and very well behaved and we just had a nice time chatting and relaxing for a bit. We headed back to the house after dinner and watched an episode of Billy Connolly’s World Tour of New Zealand and then Julie was starting to fade pretty quickly so we just got ready to bed and fell asleep nice and early.

For those of you in the UK looking for a track 10km in the summer, there is going to be one at Meadowbank Stadium on June 6^th. There are very few track 10km opportunities in the UK and I’ve seen a lot of complaints about this issue online so here is a perfect opportunity to run one during the thick of the track season. Meadowbank can be a very fast track when the weather is good so hopefully there will be a good turnout for the event. It is open to everyone and there are a bunch of Scots already signed up and they are hopefully going to attract the Eritreans to the event so you can expect the event to be won close to 29 minutes.