All Downhill From Here

A couple of runners who love me (who babysit and feed me pb bagels) have reminded me that I need to keep up the speed work or I’ll lose the conditioning I built up at the track the last couple of months. I haven’t historically associated structured work outs with our Gord’s Store Tuesday night excursions, so I think they were a little concerned that I might lose some of my training momentum.

In an effort to keep the speed and yet still play with my peeps tonight, I introduced speed play a la Galloway. Yes Coach, I’ve been doing my homework too. Page 69, Jeff Galloway’s MARATHON! expounds on the idea of having a little fun with your repeats. I didn’t go as far as actually measuring a distance or bringing music and banners, but I did bring a playful attitude and my watch. I set my watch to 2 minute repeats and aimed for 4 x 2 minutes at about my 400m (no talking) pace.

I was almost too late to run our Penguins at first. I yakked too long at dinner and made some bad traffic-related choices on the way there. I saw them leaving just as I was parking, but they didn’t see me. I got my first speed interval in before I’d even warmed up, just trying to catch up to them. Thank goodness Gord had assigned the curling club stairs descent and I’m a crazy downhillnut. I was able to catch up with them. Once Joanne, Krista, Kelly and I were good and warmed up, we had a lovely flat, paved, pretty straight stretch of riverside pathway between 14 St and Centre. It was Joanne’s first night out with us and I don’t think she was up to doing intervals (she’d done an intense session at the gym earlier that day), so I explained I would be looping back in a couple of minutes.

Krista was up with Kelly way ahead of us in my first interval, and exclaimed in surprise as I breezed by with just a wave of my red wooly mitt. In my 2 minute walking/jogging break while looping back, I told her what I was up to and she ran the next three with me. That took us right up to the Centre Street bridge, and we walked a bit to recover before running back up the hill to Gord’s from there. No extra stairs this time – we had put in a solid hour of good running already.

Oh, and from my post’s title you’re probably wondering what I ran into, eh?

My favourite publication, Impact Magazine just ran a little blurb that Dawn and I wrote about blogging for their March/April Annual Running Issue. We got about 5 inches of info and got to plug Complete Running and the RBF, Breaking the Tape, and of course our own blog addresses. The magazine is free at Gord’s, but if you pop in to your local running store in western Canada, you can likely find it there, too. There’s tons of great info, a race source guide, and Gord has some interesting stuff on 10k training in there, too. I brought home a few extra copies to share.