Friday, January 15, 2010

The Last Couple Weeks

It has been a very good last couple weeks of training. I've had some really solid workouts, and have put in some good long-runs, and you can't complain when it's mid-January and 50-plus degrees and sunny everyday. It's like fake spring-time. Can't beat Colorado any time of the year, but there's plenty more snow and sub-zero mornings yet to come I'm sure, but it's nice to shake things up a little.

Have also had a few pretty good runs with the UCCS team this past week, school's not back in for them yet but everyone on the team is back in town gearing up for the indoor season so it's been good to have some training partners on a handful of days. It makes me nostalgic for my college running days....
Anyways, Misch had the team over the other morning for a post-run-pancake-fest and he, along with side-kick/assistant coach Corey Kubatzky turned out the famous (well, famous amongst UCCS runners) peanut-butter-chocolate-chip pancakes. I will tell you right now that if either of them don't end up cutting it as coaches, they have a very bright future at the IHOP (I jest, I jest). But I digress.

Initially I wasn't really planning on running any races until U.S. Cross in a little less than a month, but I kinda feel like I need a tune-up. There's a four-mile cross country race in Boulder on the 23rd--the Fast and the Flurry-ous (formerly known as the Best XC Race on the Planet)--that I'm thinking about doing because it just seems ideal, but then it conflicts with my favorite-ever workout that I was going to do this week. But doing both that particular workout and the race would be one of those situations where I believe about one week afterwards I would come to the realization that in retrospect, doing both was a bad choice. So I'm debating. Mentally I feel like a race would be more beneficial, but physically I feel like the workout would. Maybe I'm over-analyzing this one. I need to wrestle with this a bit more.

Anyway, best of luck to any BRC-er's competing in Houston this weekend (Tera)--looking foward to seeing the results!!

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Hills.

So yesterday was my first real workout since Club Nationals. I have been doing a lot of uptempo running (around 5:45-6:00 pace), but had not done any structured intervals until yesterday.

The Western State team was doing hill repeats (10x 200 meter hills), so I decided to jump in and break up the monotony of slow distance running. I felt really strong, so I opted to do 15 of them with one of our 10K guys. The first 10 were much faster because I had to hold off one of our anxious freshman on each one, as we were running 31-32 on the last 4 uphill! This was much faster than I wanted to go, so one the last 5 I was just running 35's with our 10K runner.

Overall, it was a great first workout. I always love doing hills early season. I am not particularly strong at hill-running by nature, so I really focusing on improving my economy and efficiency and getting better at running them.

That's about it.

Paul