WILD WINTER DAY
This last week was a down week for me, I took two days off, one in Hawaii and one on the day we travelled back home. For the week I totalled 70 miles compared to my near 100 miles the week before this gave the boost I needed to plan the next three weeks at a high average weekly mileage.
All the math aside an easy 10 miles on the trails Saturday with the crew and an easy 8 miles back in Langley that evening gave me a good amount of running the day before our group long run through Stanley Park slated for the next day.
A large group of us met at Brockton Oval at 9am for the run, 15 miles were to be run with Richard on the bike leading us through the trails up and down the hillier parts of the park. As we got going a group of 4 of us formed, Dylan W, Sam P, Geoff R and I with our bike guide.The day was great, sunny and clear, but still really cold, so as expected we started slow and gradually picked it up as we warmed up to the elements( I did this by overdressing and shedding some cloathes after half an hour).
In the first 30 minutes we went up and down some serious hills, turned around and ran up and down some more, we hit some flats going towards loon lake, then ran a part of our 3 km loop going again up hill which seemed flat now after the hills we had just climbed. We got to a point just over an hour where Richard said okay another loop of that. I thought he was full of it but we went out and basically did the same thing but somehow we hit a climb or two extra. We got back on the the familiar 3km loop and I looked at my watch and figured we would take a right and head over the horse/pedestrian bridge to beaver pond and back to the cars, time wise it made sense to me, but to my surprise no. We continued on straight, up Birdie trail I think, which is quite a long strung out incline. At this point I was thinking about Sam Dee in the book The Olympian, where this coach shows up at a park on a bike to put a 400 meter runner, he had “discovered,” the day before training at his local track, through a 2 1/2 hour run to test his will and convince him that he is a miler. Sam Dee takes this runner through hill and valley timing him the whole time pushing him to the point of collapse. I thought of this as we ran up these hills in Stanley park from one trail to the next hitting I think every possible hill one after another till 1 hour 40 minutes later we were finally done having covered 15.5 miles.
It was a hell of a run and good to have company during it, the distance and time itself isn’t impressive but knowing the terrain we covered and the easy pace we ran for the first bit of the run it was a good effort for that day.
I have a full week this next week with a workout on the track, progression run in the trails, tempo run at the Park and a long run on Sunday with recovery runs sprinkled in between should be a good week. Also I have some exciting news coming up in regards to my training, hopefully I will be able to report on it later in the week or early next week at the latest.
