The Renegade

Ran with Paul today up to Cliffside, around Gibbons Park, and then back through Providence. It's been a long while since I've run up a hill for a sustained amount of time, even 5 minutes. Given it was a steep hill, but yeah my lower legs killed. Quads felt fine tho, must be the squats I've been doing. But after than hill climb my upper achilles and lower calves were burning for most of the run, until we got back to main street and the light took forever. Go7:t back to the school and did 4 strides on lane one of the freshly plowed track, oh yeah. Beautiful out today, nice and sunny, and relativley warm. After that, you guessed it we lifted. 7:42 avg. on the run. 

8 x Temple hill today. Splits were:

34.2 
34.6 
35.5 
34.3 
33.8 
33.7 
33.8 
32.6

34.06 avg.

(For 200m steep uphill with 2:30 rests)

Felt decent today, I think that's my best average ever. I felt pretty good on most of them then it started hurting at the end of the 6th rep, and Jack and I pushed it as hard as we could on the last one, it hurt, felt like I was being crushed by gravity. We were on the ground. Fun times! Haha I actually did a decent amount of core today, I'm going to make sure to do a solid session of core every other day, with weights on the other other days, except for when a meet interupts it. 

Got to practice, did the half mile warmup upstairs, and then coach had everyone do like quite a bit of core, and I was surprised since I just did a bunch yesterday but I tried not to complain, it'll be good. Then we headed out for a run with the crew. Today was super cold, about ten degrees cooler than I expected and I had brought shorts. It was pretty slow at first because Jack likes to mess around when we're running with everyone, then Jack had to pick up his car from the auto shop, so Paul and I went on at a normalish recovery pace for us, last 5 miles were 7:20 ap. We actually did a loop out north of the school because thats were Jack's car was, it aint a bad place to run it's just pretty lame. Did a few strides on the track after. Pollution was bad I'm sure too, but we didn't wanna use the treadmills because I can't run more than like 3 miles on a treadmill without wanting to crank up the pace. Afterwards we lifted and I moved up to 100 lb for bench and 165 for squats yay :P. Kept cleans the same tho. 

So today we had our hardest workout of the indoor season, although I'm not sure that I took as hard as I should have. The workout was 10 x 400 @ mile pace or faster with 3 mins 400m recovery, so 5 miles on the track. Splits:

74.8,     75.0,     77.1,     73.2,     71.7,     74.0,     69.7,     71.3,     66.7,     63.6      

71.7 AVERAGE

So coach was going to have us do a threshold today but I really wanted to do this workout further out from Simplot, so I got him to change it. The air quality is sooo bad, if you didn't already notice, but running outside is still great. Temps were in the low to mid 30s. The backstretch of the track had a long 50m patch of ice, but there was just enough narrow space to sneak past it easily enough. After a mile indoors, got out there changed shoes and started. I went at what felt like mile pace for me, but it was slower, I was supposed to be at 72.5 (4:50). Took me a while to get into it. By then I was half way through the workout before I started running faster. I still averaged under mile pace due to those outliers at the end, which I'm actually happy about, but I should have stayed even. Felt decent though, I can't wait to do this on a nice warm day during outdoor. Last two were reasonably hard, but not as hard as I could have made them by running the whole workout fast. Still ran a faster last rep than I did last season with much slower overally reps. Cooled down about half a mile inside. No core today. 

Procrastinated my run, also woke up at noon today (no school) so I did a night run up to main street, ran north, than took a street east until I hit temple blvd and head back from there. Felt decent. 7:37 ap with 7:02 last mile. My foot was hurting me a bit but then I stopped and loosened my laces and it felt fine. Pumped for the Olympic Marathon Trials tomorrow! I might not get to watch them :( but can't wait to see what happens especially on the men's side. 

So I slept in, traveled, than we got back too late for me to do the long run on the treadmill I was going to do. Super dissapointed that I couldn't run today but hopefully it just means I'll be more rested for Simplot. It's kind of iffy because maybe mantaining what I was doing would bemore beneficial but we'll see.