Trip, Twist and Fall!

With last week being a build II schedule I was pretty tired on Sunday night and was wondering how I would feel on our Monday Gorge run. I made sure I ate all the prescribed food on my plan every day since I saw Mark. That meant I had 1 day of 1965 calories and 3 days of 2645 calories. I payed close attention to the timing of my meals to ensure I would be able to eat them all. I have to say it was hard the first two days but after that I was ready to eat every meal and the energy I had on Monday was significant. My mind continues to battle with amount of calories and especially the amount of complex carbs I need to eat but I feel like I am slowly trusting the process.

Trisha, Susan I did the same loop as last week but about 20 minutes faster. With all the lovely fall leaves on the ground you never know what's underneath. This mystery led to many twists, trips and one fall. I did all the twisting, Trisha did the tripping and Susan performed the not so graceful fall. Fortunately no one got hurt but Susan did call me the next day to say she felt bruised up in the shoulder area. Trisha is really taking her training seriously and from what I can tell is not the least bit uncomfortable pushing herself to new limits. It's really fun to watch someone make so much progress and have fun doing it. There really is no better recipe than that. She powered up the hills running most of them making me work hard to get a picture! We stopped at the big intersection to refuel and take a picture. Ultra could not resist giving Susan a kiss, she just wouldn't stop! :). Next week there will be no Gorge Monday because all are kids are out of school for a holiday. Good timing because next week is recovery and after all the workouts this week I am going to need it.

I am loving all the energy, it's honestly so much more than I had before. I keeping waiting for the big crash to come but so far everything surrounding my workouts is powerful, time will tell. Yesterday was my first track workout so I got put on my lightening fast red shoes and when I arrived at the track I saw that it had been resurfaced since my last visit! It was almost like seeing a long lost friend, strange because I would have never said that 2 years ago. My description would have been more like, "yikes I see a ghost"! Tom came down to make sure I didn't slack off but I think his real motivation was to do a bit of speed work himself and see if I could do a pull up. I ran a good 3 mile warm up on Terrwilliger than came back down and did 10X100-150 meter sprints with 2-3 minutes slow running in between. Tom didn't do the sprints but he wasn't very far behind me. My sprints felt awkward for the first 5 but once I got in the groove they felt better but not easy. Once I was done we headed over to the pull up bar and of course I gave Tom all the usual excuses....I haven't done any pull ups, I was out of the weight room for 8 weeks, pull ups are hard......there were more but I can't remember them. He simply said what he always says, "shut up and get up there". So I go for the easy kind first, narrow grip palms facing forward and boom!....I easily knocked out 5!. I shocked myself but then got motivated. Next, the wide grip, palms facing away from the face, boom!....easily knock out 3. Needless to say I left the track pretty happy and even more motivated.

The rest of the week is 2 recovery runs, 1 tempo run, 1 KPR run and one moderate long run. This week I reintroduced "Time in Tension" leg workouts but started light and will build up slowely. I have two leg workouts a week and only do the TinT one time and the other is endurance based one legged workout, Scott's prescribed leg workout. Yesterday Scott set my VDOT at 43 which means my T-Pace will be 7:42, M-Pace will be 8:15 and E pace will be 9:27. At the end of my training for WS100M my VDOT was 51 so I am stoked to see the number climb as I do the work.