Next target: one opportunity

There has been a major change produced in my racing schedule. Ever since I started training for the 2008 indoor season I had in mind racing PSNI and than going to Notre Dame University for the Meyo Invite, where I was planning to run the 3k. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to race at Mayo because that weekend I’ll be travelling with SFU track team for our conference meet (NEC), which is scheduled earlier than the other conferences are. Therefore, I needed to adjust my schedule and find other competition where I could compete in my favorite event (the 3k). Tyson Invite, hosted by the University of Arkansas, is scheduled to take place the weekend of 15^th-16^th of Feb, and I will be running the 3km there. The only problem with this meet is the fact that I do not know whether I will be running the invite race or not.

Training for the last couple of days has gone pretty good. Monday, Feb 28, I went for a 60 minute long run. I used one of the roads that connects SFU with other small places around the area. This one road as most of them here is very hill and challenging. I started from SFU and went 30 min one way and turned around to finish a complete hour of running at a decent pace. After the run I stretched good as I usually do and did 2 sets of 40 push-ups.

The hardest work out so far this week was scheduled for Tuesday and consisted of hill repeats. It happened to rain that day, which made me think whether I should run or not. In the end I took the risk and still did the training, which was really long indeed. Before the hill work-out I ran for 60 minute continuously. I started from SFU track, where I had parked my car, and went 30 min towards Ebensburg and 30 min back to SFU. As soon as I finished the run I changed everything I was wearing and put on dry clothes and shoes. I continued my training with 10×500m hill repeats. For this particular work-out I used the hill which is located right by the track and field stadium. I was lucky that rain stopped while I was doing the long hill repeats. Without measuring the hill, it looked like it was about 400m long, but I changed my thought right after timing the first one. I felt good working that hill 10 times and put a great deal of effort throughout. Stretching well after a training like this was necessary because my muscles got really tight, and needed to loosen up a bit.

The rain and warmer temperatures (mid thirty) we have had lately here melted a good percentage of snow, but track still had some snow on it so could not be used yet. Yesterday (Wed) was a much easier day for me which consisted of 60 minutes of easy jogging on the football turf. After the run I arranged 10 hurdles as I usually do and did 10 sets of 10 plyometrics over them. I love this exercise because it worx a great deal of important muscles.

Today I went for a 12 mile long run at a good pace. At first I wanted to use the Ebensburg trail, but unfortunately snow still holds tight throughout the trail. I was forced to redirect my run someplace else, and I chose to go from Ebensburg towards Loretto using a back road. After my run I did my usual stretching exercises and did some push ups (2×40).

There is one more fast training scheduled for this week, which will most likely take place tomorrow (Fri) if weather is ok. I just checked to see what the weather is predicted to be like tomorrow and seems that I may not have too much luck (Ice to Rain/ Wind-High: 38°Low: 24°).