cheryl

There are parts of Daybreak I've been wanting to run lately, just because there seems to be a hill every so often to break up the monotomy of running, so my group was nice enough to meet me and that's what we ran this am.  Those there:  Peggy, Michelle, Kris, Walter, Kelli and Kelli's hubby Scott, and Nancy M. ran with us part of the time.  I thought it was fun.  Thanks all for joining us this morning.  See you tomorrow for more hills!  We love hills, we love hills, we love hills (just keep saying that over and over when you are running up a hill.  I think it works.)

This PM I felt like doing a few more, so I put in 3 on the treadmill.  Not as much as Steve running 20 in the morning and then 10 in the afternoon, or Walter who ran with us this morning and then ran up Dog Lake this afternoon, but it was a little additional mileage.

We met at Parkway Palisades to run those hills we love so much.  We had a pretty big group today, so that was fun.  First we ran around a 2.5 mile warm-up, then it was to the street with the hills to do hill repeats.  I absentmindedly erased my times, but I think I remember.   The first was about 9:47, the second was around 9:10, the third was 8:46 and the fourth would have been about 8:35 if we hadn't stopped early to run hill sprints.  We did 3 1-minute hill sprints at the end.  It was all a lot of fun.

Peggy and Debbie met at my house at 5:45 to run 10 miles.  We did the up and back Glenmoor route that I plotted out many years ago when I was training for some St. George marathon, I can't remember the exact year, probably 2000 or 2001.  I used to dread doing that run but felt it was good because of the up and down involved.  It was much nicer today because of the company.  A ten mile run no longer intimidates me because of the higher mileage we've all been doing.  A twenty mile run still intimidates me.   Maybe, despite what I said to Peggy about hating 20 mile training runs and feeling all they did was wear me down, I need to do a few of them.  We'll see. 

PM--Ran 4 more on the treadmill.  Fun!! 

Our group met at Gardner Village to run around marathon pace.  As usual, I felt like the effort was a little difficult starting out, but then I worked my way into it, at least by half way.  We went to the 5 mile mark, even though I couldn't find the actual mark, it's just where I remembered it was, think that mile was a little long, then turned around and ran back.  My splits:

1- 9:52

2- 9:27

3-8:56

4-8:30

5-8:57

6-9:07

7-8:31

8-8:40

9- 8:38

10- 8:04

Total time:  1:28:46

Yesterday, we ran the 10 miles in 1:36:49, so this was better, even though yesterday was an "easy" day and today I pushed it a little more.  I guess my marathon pace as of right now is somewhere between 8:30-8:45, not quite the 8:00 I hope for, but we'll see what happens in the next 6 weeks.  I also spent 30 minutes on the stationary bike, so I'm giving myself 2 miles for that.

I put my treadmill on a high incline and ran slowly for 50 minutes.  That got me 4 miles.  I wanted to do more later but never got around to it.  Good luck to all Hobblecreek runners!!  I think we're going to see a lot of PR's.

I was sad I had to miss all the fun races this morning, but my 9 year old had a football game at 8:00am and I just felt like I should be there.  It was their first real game, and it was pretty exciting, they won on a last second touchdown pass.  How many Gremlin (8 and 9 year olds) games end on a TD pass?  They usually can't complete any passes, so that was especially exciting for all of us.

After, I was pretty pumped up, so I got on the treadmill right away and ran for an hour at a pretty easy pace, throwing in some harder intervals along the way.  That got me 6.5 miles.  I then rested for a few minutes, then ran again, this time faster, and got in another 4 miles.  I felt good about the running, but the miles probably aren't enough for a "long run" for a marathon coming up in 6 weeks.  Oh well, we do what we can, right?  Congratulations to all who had great races today.  This blog has helped everyone get faster and faster.