The smarter it gets the further it’s going to go

Yesterday I did a key 10 000m workout on the track.  Chris and Dave shovelled two lanes of the track on Wednesday to clear enough space for an early season session.  It’s too bad I don’t have a picture of us on the track because it looked pretty cool.  There was snow a few inches high on either side of the cleared lanes and if you looked across the infield it looked as if we were running on snow.  Most of the group did 1km repeats but myself and Destroyer had two 2km repeats added in the mix.  In all, we had 10km worth of intervals with 2 minutes rest the entire way through.  My cumulative time was 28:16 which bodes well for my next race in three weeks. 

I can’t help looking back to similar workouts in my old running logs.  Almost three years ago to the day I did a similar workout with a cumulative time of 28:04.  However in that particular workout I had 4 minutes rest after the 2km sections and the final 2.8km was split up with 800’s and 400’s which made it easier to run a faster pace.  Weeks later I went on to run 28:21 and then 27:56.  I’m looking for a similar result for my first 10 000m outing and eventually looking to improve even more for the key race one month later. 

Today I put in a solid 32km with Josephat through Ancaster and Dundas.  The guy has to start doing some speed work because he’s way too fresh for most of these runs the day after I have a tough workout.  I run with Josephat 2-3 times/week and sometimes he just runs away from me and I have to let him because I need to recover from the day before.  When we were both on the same schedule for the marathon and doing speed work together it was he who had to slow down the recovery runs more than myself.  He won a half marathon last weekend so his training is going pretty well off of no structured workouts but I feel he isn’t going to be too pleased once he faces some tough competition.  Maybe that will be his wake up call to start doing more fartlek, tempo and track sessions.  In case you’re wondering, he works in the afternoons when I go to Guelph for workouts, that’s why we don’t do speed work together.

I can’t believe the article I read today in the Globe about the Canadian XC ski team members getting hate mail because they didn’t let Brian McKeever race at the Olympics.  It really is too bad that Brian wasn’t able to fulfill his Olympic dream of competing and making history as the first winter athlete to compete in the Olympics and Paralympics.  On the other hand I feel it would have been more of a travesty if coaches had pulled a more deserving athlete out of the race in order to make a good story for the Canadian public.  The people who are pissed probably don’t support or even pay attention to our skiers for 206 of every 208 weeks anyways and now they feel like they know best. And on the topic of Olympic XC skiing, what a great performance by Devon Kershaw, 5th place is incredible. He looked very disappointed in his interview to be so close to gold (1.6 seconds out) but hopefully now he has had the time to reflect and be proud of what he has done. 

Last night I saw this guy…

… I absolutely had to stop and record some of his skills.  Unfortunately the lighting is poor but it is still entertaining nonetheless. 

GOALIE PADS!