Maximum 70

It's been another good week of vacation and I'm not really looking forward to going back in a week's time. I was able to get a few chores cleaned up and finally finished the retaining wall on the back of our house. The only problem is the little chipmunk who seems to think he still owns the place and refuses to move out. It was very heavy work moving the big timbers around and I spent most of Saturday afternoon getting the last pieces finished. My reward was a nice cool shower and a beer as I rested up for Sunday's big run with Andrew.

The past running week was excellent too with all planned runs according to the schedule (more or less). After the excellent 21 miler with Andrew last Sunday the week went like this:

Monday - rest day; tired and heavy legs but worked on retaining wall and the heavy timbers

Tues - still with heavy legs from Sunday and so I delayed my big workout for a day, replacing it with an easy 1hr run (7.5 mi) and then spent the rest of the day on the 'wall'

Weds - a workout of 6-7 x 1 mile cruise repeats that I've been dreading for weeks now. It was 1st scheduled a few weeks ago but was canned due to recovery from the 1/2 marathon. As Andrew has noted the mental aspects of preparing for feared planned workouts are usually much worse than the actual performance itself. The idea of these cruise reps is to run at a pace slightly faster than marathon pace with rest breaks between each mile. It's not a long continuous effort and so you should be able to manage it without breaking down the body too much and be able to go at it again the next day. So, after a 1 mile warmup it was do or die time and I started churning away on my out and back hilly route going out of town. The 1st mile went by in 7:13, followed by a 1:30 jog break and felt like I was only firing on 4 out of 8 cylinders. Next in 7:12, followed by a 7:01, 7:11, 7:14 but stopped at 6 when the last came in at 7:33 (uphill). I've got slow marathoners legs and seem to be losing my speed as the legs and engine had little pop today. I'm hoping that this workout will improve as I go along and plan to do it on the same route the next time around.

Thurs - staple mid-week semi-long run of 2 hours with a little over 14 miles covered. It was a nice slow run during the late morning on my loops and trails around town. The weather was perfect at 15C with fog and mist and a bit of light rain. I saw a deer with her baby fawn and enjoyed 2 episodes of Phedippidations with Steve Runner. No problems except my right hamstring which has been very tight and affected my stride for the 1st mile or so until it loosened up.

Friday - 10 miles while doing my current favorite workout which is a fartlek run with 1, 2, 3 min hard efforts broken up with 2-4 minute easy breaks while running wherever I please. These are very enjoyable, non-stressful runs where I can just stride out easily or with some purpose where I work on maintaining good form and just enjoying the movement. I had some issues with my hamstring again which started cramping on one of the efforts and so had to ease up on the last few.

Sat - just and easy 1 hour run with a little over 7.5 miles covered. While I was finishing my run I knew that my weekly mileage was approaching this number (see picture below) and decided that you all needed to see another goofy picture of me holding up the sign.

So the total for the week was 70 miles in 9.5 hrs of running. Not a bad week at all but nothing in comparison to what our friend Jamie and his buddy Ultra-Flash: Stephen did at the Vermont 100 this past weekend. Congrats you animals! They are both 'Beyond Category' in my books.

Gotta go now. Here's a picture of my birthday cake to be, safely in the cupboard to protect it from one Cody cat. I'm now off to Bathurst to visit my Mom for a few days and will be staying at my sisters cottage on the beach.

See you later and have a great week.

ps. Andrew and I had a 'sick' 3 hour run on Sunday past which had us both in the 'HOK" position at the end, despite running slowly. More on 'that' later.