The best pace is a suicide pace

We did the park run we always do on thursdays at footlocker. I really love it. It's a good one. Lots of fun fences to jump over n stuff. From the park, we ran up to the course (which is actually way close to the park) and I ran one lap around the first loop and did half of the switchbacks before going back felt good. It was late, and I love night running. I went pretty fast

ran the Mt. SAC course, with only one lap around the dirt loop that makes up the first 800, which is done twice in the actual race. I'm actually excited, the course was somehow really fun, and I can't wait to run it, in spite of the hills.

 I actually enjoyed this race, and ran it competitively for the first time ever. The hills hurt really bad, I seriously need to work on hills a lot next season, but I felt really strong when I wasn't on one of the hills. Talon set a quick pace at the beginning, and we ran the first mile with the front pack. This pack spread out over the course of the race, but I stayed with it the whole time, which I'm quite proud of.  Pretty sure my first mile was sub-5, but that's going off of that I was a few seconds ahead of talon, whose watch said 5:04, because there wasn't a timer at the mile markers this year. There was only one timer, and that was at about 1.5 miles for some reason, which makes no sense. There weren't even any other coaches calling out splits. This kind of upset me. This was my last XC race of junior year, and it sucks that it ended with me 4 places away from a medal. Four places. I'll get that shiny next year, so help me. It was really a great race though, pardon the bipolar entry. My back was really sore right at the shoulder blades, which is really weird for me, that never happens. I'll probably take a few weeks off now, so sorry to all my devout followers who will have no exposure to quality literature until the new year, in the absence of my blog entries.

USU track camp sprint clinic. Lots of sprint drills, very little actual running though. Learned to use blocks and improve my start so those things could be useful someday.

distance clinic today. During the sprint clinic last night, I never really got tired, but apparently we actually did some good work. My hip flexors, hamstrings, and quads were all quite sore this morning. Did dynamics and an 8 mile run. The first mile or two was terrible because this was my first real run at altitude since footlocker, so I wasn't quite acclimated at first, and I was way sore. Once we got in a little way though, my lungs caught up and my legs loosened out a bit, so I finished it pretty strong. Did intense core stuff afterwards, lots of ab, quad, and hip flexor stuff. Made me very sore, tomorrow is going to be painful

fell down my stairs and sprained my ankle

It was cold. 12 degrees, it kind of sucked. Considering the conditions, I'm pretty happy about today's run. warmed up with Talon, Rylie, and Reagan at the indoor, then diecided I needed a longer run than I'm capable of doing in there. I stepped outside, and immediately regretted it, but too late, the door locked behind me. First run with new watch (forerunner 235) which was really nice. lots of useful information that wasn't available with the old 10. Pace was good, fastest was 6:17, slowest was 6:35, so pretty quick for the weather and having only ran twice since footlocker. BYU indoor in a couple of weeks, and if I can go, hoping for either a low 4:50's mile or a 10:30-40 3200. not sure which I'll do, but I refuse to do both

Met up with Eugene for a longer recovery run. We did 6.5, with the average pace at 7:30. It's been a while. Had some good conversations, talked about Ragnars, college, and the sweet, sweet release of death. The run felt great, the weather was similar to yesterday, but the sun was out, which made all the difference. It was nice to just do a chill, conversation pace type run. I have a surprise for anyone reading this who was on our ragnar team last year...