Monday, October 02, 2006

The 2nd week of Sunmart training

57 miles. This week was the most we've run in any one week so far. Monday and Friday with its cross-trainings were promptly skipped, or glossed 0ver if you prefer that. Thursday easy run happened around IF, close enough to home and such. Tuesday, I did track workouts with the full marathon folks at the School for the Deaf.

Wednesday we were slated for Hill of Life (HOL) repeats. The HOL if you dont know it, has an elevation gain of nearly 400 ft. over a distance of half a mile; and if you try running it, it feels like you've come 10miles in those 10minutes of the climb. Joe said we are going down the longer way, and climbing the hill the short (0.5mi) way back; we do at least 4 repeats; we dont do more than 6 repeats. Santhosh promptly asked if he should do 6 repeats. Joe left it to us how many we wanted to do; and just said, "4 will achieve the intentions of the workout, any more you do, is to show off that you are 'the man'!". Needless to say, Santhosh did 5. (To be absolutely frank, I did 5 too. But the last one was accompanying Ani on her last repeat. )

HOL repeats were a lot of fun. I learnt an important lesson of hill running. DONT. The two laps when I power walked up the hill were faster than the two laps I tried running up the hill. Joe also demonstrated the fun way to skip down hills where you just let go, and the foot will find its way. Of course, all good in theory only.

The weekend I was in Palo Alto, and I hooked up with Anil Rao to run my 22miler. Anil and me go back a long way, to our training for each of our first marathons, back in summer of 2003. Since then Anil has run 10 ultras including 3 50-milers. He's running one more first weekend of November, and he was also planning a 22-mile run on Saturday. We met at Campbell Park where rest of the Asha SV team was also doing a 20-22 mile training run for the Chicago marathon. The 22 was fairly uneventful, except that Anil gave me a lot of information about what he and Rajeev (my coach) had learnt over time, in terms of nutrition etc. Later Rajeev also gave me some gaiters to cover the shoe while running in dirt. Sunday run was more nostalgic than hard. I ran in Rancho San Antonio, on the familiar PG&E trail and the upper wildcat trail. Covered 14miles and actually felt good at the end of it.

I am really looking forward to the next week when all we do is REST, after Wednesday.

1 comment:

Ani said...

"To be absolutely frank, I did 5 too. But the last one was accompanying Ani on her last repeat."

What is that sposed to mean!! I was looking to find some cool quotes of yours for our brochure..it currently as something random about eating pasta. For this, I'll just leave it like that!