Signing up

I'm signing up for races. My last race was the Blue & Gray Half-Marathon in December, which didn't go very well. I don't recall worrying about it too much, so maybe I should say my last race was the Turkey Trot. Anyway, I'm signing up for the Civitan's 10K on Memorial Day in Fredericksburg. I

Ready to mail!

haven't run this race since it left the Coldwell Banker Grand Prix Series, so since 2010. I definitely need to get a rust buster under my belt before I chase the white whale on July 4 at the Heritage Festival. Charlie will be joining me in May, looking for another race of his own.

When I decided I should run this race, I was cooling down from a hill workout I did on Little High Street. I'm still searching for a place to get in a 3 minute hill interval. Little High gave me about 2:10 of a hill, and then a little more incline, but still not quite there. I think I'll have to try O-Hill on campus, but even then I'm not sure if it's going to be 3 minutes. It is really steep though, so maybe it'll be too steep to make it to the top in 3 minutes. The rest of the workout, the 2- and 1-minute sessions were good on Little High. The workout was tough. The rest of the team was doing a 5-mile tempo run I think. I decided I should try to run something at marathon pace sooner or later to see if I can. I need to start mixing up some tempo into long runs soon.

I've been sticking to the 2 x 2 miles on the track recently, but this week I did both of the workouts Mark  assigned us, for the most part. Tuesday we went to Bellair for the "Grand Prix" loops. 60 second intervals with 30 seconds rest until a certain place (so two and a half hard intervals) and then three hills, back to where we started. The loop itself was about a mile and a half and Thomas, Charlie and I did 4 loops. I worked really hard to keep up with them on the recovery on loop 1 and I paid for it on the rest. My loops didn't get faster each time, but whatever. It was good, I worked hard and got dropped badly.

Here is that workout.

Friday, Thomas did a 3k time trial and ran 8:42. Charlie paced him for about a mile, then Seth brought him home for the last kilometer. The rest of us were working out simultaneously, and it was neat being behind them and watching the "race" unfold at the end. Thomas started kicking with 300 meters to go and the change in his form when he went was really noticeable at that point.

Meanwhile, we were supposed to do 6 x 1000 and 4 x 400. I went to the track unsure about what I was going to do, and with a very sore left achilles. Alec and Rachel were there to do the 1000s, so I jumped in with them and Sallie. Chris and Seth were much farther ahead. We started out to run 3:20 pace. 600 meters in, I started to think that I wasn't going to be able to sustain this pace for two miles. Then I realized I was only doing thousands. Thank God!

After half of them I decided that I was going to do 8 intervals instead of doing the 400s. The rest of the group stopped at 6. Charlie did one with me, and the wind started to blow somehow for the first time during the morning. On the last one, I started to get tired on the seconds 300 meters, but then I did try to kick it in at the end. The first K was 3:22, and the last 3:13. A lot of 3:15s in the middle though.

That workout is here.

Tomorrow I'm doing a long run in town with the team. It has been a long time since I've gone long with more than one RMR teammate at a time, it is hard to congregate the group on the weekends. I'm looking forward to it! I'm already around 44 miles so far, so barring disaster, this should be my longest week of mileage of the year. The last two weeks were both just under 53 miles. Now that the semester is wrapping up, I'm going to try to start running 7 days a week again. Progress.