Running Against the Wind

Last Saturday's training marked the time divergence of San Diego runners from Seattle and Alaska runners. Since their race is nearly a month sooner than ours, they have less time to prepare, and so from now on they will be running different times than the rest of us on Saturdays. Anyway, we're still tapering back up which meant a 2 hour run for San Diego runners and 1 hour 40 minutes for the rest of us... I happened to be the only one doing a full in Seattle (Sarah had gone camping that weekend) and Alaska which meant that for most of the way, I had to run alone : ( Actually I found it to be kind of a relaxing experience where I was able to think and just enjoy the beautiful morning. I mapped the run after, too, and ended up running about 8.7 miles! It was also a special run because one of the TNT team heroes, Crystal, who is currenty battling blood cancer, was sagging for us.

Sagging it up, solo.

Wednesday was track and we had a pretty tough workout, made harder by the gale-force winds we were having last week! The workout started with the usual mile warm-up and then continued with a "Swedish" group drill in which 5-8 people lined up single-file and run together while the person at the back sprints to the front of the line, then the next, and so on. We did this drill 2 laps (800m) at a time, 4 times, and then 1 lap (400m) at a time, 4 more times! The crazy wind kept up the whole practice and was super hard to sprint against, too. My group runs at about the same pace so we worked well together, but our last lap we sprinted the whole way and I think my lungs just about exploded when we finished!

Leading the pack. Go team!

In fundraising news, big thanks this week go to:

Terri West

Valley High School

Jackie Li

I'm just under $2,500 and 62% of the way to my goal!! Sarah and I have started planning our next fundraiser, a Spaghetti Feed, to be held (tentatively) on May 1st, so hopefully that will be very successful!

The vicious wind kept up the rest of the week and made running on my own super unpleasant and difficult, but luckily it died down by the weekend for my first official race (see next post)!!