Saturday morning I woke up to a new dusting of snow and a strong desire to go skiing on the golf course near my house. This is becoming my new golf course – especially since I only golf about once every two years. This place holds cross country meets in the fall and they groom about 7K for x-country skiing in the winter. What more do you want from a golf course? Plus I only have to drive about 2 minutes to get there and it’s free. Anyway, I ended up skiing for 45 minutes.
In the afternoon I ran an easy 10 miles on the treadmill while watching the Packers. I think Hasselback was a “little” frustrated. I believe he asked for a pass interference penalty on the Packers on every single passing play. That gave me 62 miles for the week on 6 runs, plus another 90 minutes of x-c skiing.
Sunday I joined Evan for our first race of the year. The idea was to run the Frigid 10K at around half marathon pace (6:20ish) in the middle of a 20 mile run. After a 6 mile warm-up, it felt like we sprinted the first mile at about 6:20 pace only to look down and see 6:40. Things got a little easier after that, as that would turn out to be our slowest mile. I think we ran 5K splits of something like 20:16/20:24 to tie for 6th place in 40:40. Complete results can be found here.
On the way home, thoughts of a 20 mile day evaporated with our remaining energy supplies and we called it a day after 18 miles.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about some of my recent posts and the comments I’ve received – along with how much I’ve been enjoying x-c skiing lately. And when I think about how I ran the second half of last year and just how miserable I felt, it makes me wonder how much was tied to last winter’s base building – even though I started to back off in January. All that rolled together makes me want to continue to try and mix in more cross country skiing the rest of the winter. I’m talking about skiing on my easy days, like skiing and running 5 miles instead of just running 10 miles. I think my body would appreciate the change of pace and give me a better chance of having a better fall marathon. There’s only one way to find out.
Quote of the day;
“Our real problem is not our strength today; it is the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hey Chad,
ReplyDeleteJust came across this blog and wanted to say hello. I had no idea who this was until I saw your picture...I knew you looked familiar, then remembered hanging out with your group after Grandma's. I've been trying to get over to Adam's store for a run but life always seems to get in the way. See you later,
Adam
Hey Adam, thanks for stopping by, I'll be sure to check out your blog and how your training is going. Hope all is well.
ReplyDelete