GRAND PRIZE

If you believe that there’s a correct pace for each workout, I’m pretty sure I’ve never trained correctly. Even when I was at my peak in college, I’m confident I was training too hard much of the time. Workouts would be run all-out – trying to impress the coach. Easy runs would be like a hard tempo effort – trying to hang with my teammates. Sure I got faster, but I also took many days off, either because I didn’t feel like running on the weekend after hammering all week, or because I would eventually get injured.


All of this has me excited to actually try and train properly while focusing just on the short stuff. Of course, I have no illusions of running the times I ran in college. However, it’ll be interesting to see if I can get down to some of my times from perhaps my mid-30s.

Yesterday I did my first interval session in probably a couple years. Typically, I just get by with mileage, tempos and hills. So it was kind of fun to be running “fast”. Given that it’s winter, even though it doesn’t feel like it, I did this workout on the treadmill; 8 x 400 meters at 2 mile race pace (I used 9.3 mph or 6:27 pace), with a 200 meter jog. It was a little difficult to do on the treadmill because of the time needed to get the belt up to speed and slow down, but I did the best I could.

Ideally, that should be like my half marathon pace, so I have a ways to go. But you gotta start somewhere.

This morning’s run reminded me of a spooky mid-October run more than a mid-December run. It was 35 degrees, misty, foggy and really dark. I managed 10 miles on the Hyland trails (sorry skiers, there’s no snow left).

Finally, I’ll close with a personal story. After 13 years, we finally upgraded to a 46” flat screen HDTV for our main level. Two weeks later, at my company Christmas party, my name was picked for the grand prize – a 46” flat screen HDTV. Luckily, since it was the grand prize, they allowed me to exchange it for something else on the list. I went with the iPad2 instead. Sweet! We wrapped it up, so it’ll be a surprise for the kids. The TV ended up going to another runner/skier. He’s just out of college, so he “needed” it more than me.

Quote of the Day;

“I wanted to be a hurdler or something. But when we had tryouts, I was so afraid to try out that I refused, kind of hung in the back of the crowd hoping I wouldn’t get noticed. The last event was the mile. And the coaches said: ‘Porter hasn’t done anything yet.’ So there I was committed; enter Pat Porter, distance runner.” – Pat Porter, who went on to become one of the most dominate U.S. runners of the 1980s