A lovely morning

I had a beautiful cool, sunny and breezy morning for our hard day workout of 10 half mile repeats.  There were 5 of us ladies out on the track this morning running around in circles.  The purpose of the half mile repeats is to train your body to maintain a certain pace.  Today's pace for the shorter distance of 800 meters, is slightly faster than the pace we plan to maintain for our half-marathon.  It was a good mental exercise though.  It was actually comfortable enough that we were able to converse a good deal.  When you can't talk, you know you're running pretty hard, by the way.

I'll be heading off on a college road trip with just my older son and me.  I'm thinking a couple of book tapes might be good.  I'm not sure if a 17 year old and a 40 - something year old can talk for 10 hours straight.  We'll take turns driving, so I know they'll be some snoozing going on.  I'm bringing my running shoes.

Oh, and did you know that Tuesday was officially the first day of Autumn?  Is that supposed to be capitalized?  Are you supposed to end a paragraph with a question?

Hug your children

My middle school daughter lost one her classmates to cancer this week.

We've both been working through it.  It's funny how grief pops up at such random times.  I think when someone near you dies, your brain is just mulling over it constantly, and thoughts about the person that you're grieving just constantly bubble to the surface.

One thing I like about running is the time spent running you can use to either think things through,or talk them over with your trail mates.  Friday was our long day.  We were supposed to do 12 1/2, but ended up at 14 miles as we went out a little too far.  It was good. And it was good to spend that time with friends. Talking.  Laughing.  Sweating.

 

Great running quote

Today I was reading a local sports magazine and ran across a great quote about running.  I felt it was blog worthy:

"There's a secret, a secret that every runner knows.  I start at point 'A.' I end at point 'A.' And somewhere in between point 'A' and point 'A' is where I find ... the point."

~Amy Kidder-Hayes

Challenging running week for me this week.  After 6 miles on Monday and Tuesday, a group of us (trying to follow the Galloway plan) decided to do half mile repeats.  (That's running way harder than usual and taking a 3 minute walking break in between.) We were supposed to do 6-8, but after 5 in excessive humidity, we decided that maybe that was enough.  Two of us ended up at the track for 5 more quarter miles at faster than race pace.  Needless to say, I was pretty tired and ended up with stomach cramps that night (dehydration?).  Not sure why, but I ended up doing a long run on Thursday--9 1/2 miles.  I had cramps that night, too.  Decided on Friday morning to take it easy and only walked three miles.

I was asking myself and my friends on Thursday, what we 30,40, and 50 - something aged women were doing running as hard as we could??  I guess the quote above is apropos.