Chicago Urbanathlon Training - Week 1 - Saturday

With any training regimine you have to be adaptable. That does not mean you take shortcuts, but each program should be etched in pencil to allow for change. Today was supposed to be my day off, but instead I decided to get up and do my long run today. My sister in law is getting married tonight and I know that after catering to the needs of my children all night long I will be in no mood to get up and run early tomorrow morning. So, I jumped up out of bed this mornning and ran.

Today I mixed up my running. I had two new goals with my run. I needed to run 11 miles and in the 11 miles I wanted to
1. Increase my mile time each mile in the first 6-7 miles. One thing I keep hearing about and reading about is how a runner should increase mile time as they run in races and not lose time. I am not good at this so today I thought I would try. I had good results in the 5 mile run yesterday running with Mr. Shepperd and wanted to be able to do it on my own.


2. I was to run the last 4 miles with Mr. Uhde and Reid on the cross country course that our middle school students run on to mix things up. We thought the hills and change of pace would help with our training for our crazy race that we have coming up.

How did it go?
It went well. I started off mile 1 at 9:11, mile 2 at 8:54, mile 3 at 8:47, mile 4 at 8:50(lost time somehow), mile 5 at 8:15, mile 6 at 7:43. At this point I had made it to the park and decided not to go for another mile and instead stretch it out and get some fluids in my body before I ran the cross country course.

The cross country course was an excellent change of pace. It killed my legs after running the 6 miles. The subtle hills and winding path really kept me focused and we took one trail off course to run one hill that was honestly almost straight up. That turned my legs to jelly. It was a good run and I think will help with the obstacles in the race. All in all I ran 10.4 miles in 1:30. My body is in need of some rest. I will not run again until Tuesday, but will do some circuit training on Monday.

I leave you with a blog post from an exclellent blog, Functional Path Training where Vern poses the question. "What are you doing?" and it reads:

Ask yourself some simple questions as you plan your workout today. Are you making them better or are you just making them tired? Are you being productive or are you just keeping them busy? Is what you are doing focused on need to do activities that reflect the demands of the sport and the needs of the individual athletes? How does today’s training session relate to yesterdays training and how does it lead to tomorrow?

What are your answers to these questions? Make yourself better as you are the only one who can. Have a great weekend! Coffeechug