Running is a means and never merely an end

Easy peasy long trail run (mostly) on the trails behind Milliken Park today, and it felt fantastic. It was perfect running weather and I just felt like I could go on for another half an hour. Coach Harris (new assistant coach) ran with us for a little while. 

Off day mileage-wise. Weights and band stretching in the evening.

Warmed up to the lower fields. My left inner thigh or groin or whatever has been killing me for the past day or 2. It took about the whole warm up to loosen up at all...I don't know what I did. The workout was 8x800m at goal race pace, so for the top group we had 3:09-3:10. Got 60sec active rest between reps. These felt pretty good, you know "good" as far as intervals go anyways. I sort of had to ease into pace though because of my groin muscle. I definitely felt better than I did on those mile repeats the other day! My splits were consistent and on. 3:09/3:10/3:06/3:10/3:09/3:10/3:11/3:06 if I remember correctly, not 100% positive about 1 or 2 of those. In any event, I was no more than a second over and 3 seconds under assigned pace, so that was good! 

3x100m sprint afterwards, then cooled down back to the locker room for abs and stretching. Hopefully I'll be able to get in to see the trainer about my pains when we have our ice bath later.

Recovery run throughout Spartanburg with Anya and Haley. Weight lifting and core afterwards.

Went to Milliken park during lunchtime between classes with the team. 2 mile warm up, then we went into a fartlek. It was 3/1/4/1/5/1 minute surges with 2 minutes easy between each. 25 minutes total, which ended up being 3.4 miles. The 1's were supposed to be at 2 mile pace, 3min at 5k, 4min at 8k, and 5min at 10k. Buuuut....that's definitely not what happened. Ended up more like 800m pace, mile pace, 2 mile pace, and 5k pace, respectively. But that's alright because we don't have a meet this weekend, so we didn't have to worry about pushing too hard and being worn out. We were just ready to work. Cool down afterwards.

Core session and ice bath later!

Easy 4 with the girls & Coach Harris's girlfriend. We never do this little mileage unless its pre-meet...that makes me nervous about practice tomorrow.

Pissed about this workout. It was such a load of crap. Its kind of a long story and I don't really want to get into it again, but basically we were supposed to have 2 mile warm up, 8k tempo, 2-3 mile cool down. But through a series of annoying events, we ended up having to stop halfway through the tempo, and then took a break, then did a 6k at tempo pace again. So it was like 2 sets of short tempos, not long enough to get any endurance in, but not short enough to get any speed in. It was so pointless and it just hurt really badly for some reason, but I didn't even feel like it was a beneficial type of hurt. Just sucked.