Travel to Spain

Tomorrow (Friday) I will be leaving to Valencia, Spain for the 12^th IAAF World indoor Championships in Athletics. For this particular competition I will be competing in the 1500m, an event scheduled to take place on Friday, March 7^th. Before going any further, I will talk about my last days of training, following my last post on the blog which was last Thursday when I had that indoor work-out at Penn State Univ.

Friday 02/22/08 I only did a light 45 min run to loosen up after the crazy 400m reps work-out. After the run I did my usual session of stretching and few push ups. During the run I was a little tired but not as much as I thought I would be, which was really encouraging.

The following day I went for a longer run (67min). Weather in Ebensburg on Sat was bad, so the only place for a run was on the roads. Winter in Loretto-Ebensburg is still in its teens and signs of spring are very far off. As far as training for Sunday, I decided to take the day off and stay warm inside.

For my Monday run I used a new road, one that I haven’t yet used, still hilly but exciting indeed. I went a little over 60 min and concluded with some playometrics. As before, I arranged seven hurdles I a row and did 12 jumps over them. After the playos I stretched well and concluded the training session for the day.

Tuesday was time for a tempo run, and the place to do it was nowhere but on the hilly road. Following 40 minutes of running at decent pace I started a 15 min tempo run and 10 min cool down. I have to say that I did not feel great running on the hills again. I know for a fact that running on the hills makes you stronger, but too many hills can have adverse reactions. With this said, I need to start avoiding hills from now on since I am not hungry for them anymore.

Together with one digit temperatures, more snow was on the way on top of the one that has accumulated over the past 10 day. Therefore, Wednesday and Thursday I had to run inside on the 160m tiny track we have here. Wed I ran for 40 min and today I ran for 45 min and did 3 sets of 20 push-ups after followed by my usual stretching session. My next training will be in Valencia, where according to the weather high 60s-low70s are waiting there for me. This trip will be in a way my real Spring Break, one week after SFU’s official.

Updating the blog with some insight information about my trip in Spain will be much determined of whether I will have internet connection or not. If Si, than I will definitely keep things up to date from over the ocean, where the biggest competition in track and field before Olympics is taking place.

Competing in the 1500m is probably the most exciting thing for me, and it wasn’t one of my plans to do so when I started to get ready for this World Championships. My aim has always been the 3000m and I still believe that I am better prepared for it than I am for the 1500m. If I could have had another shot to a good 3km within the last 3-4 weeks I believe that I would have made it in the 3k. Part of the fault is mine, but the other part is the fact that I had a bunch of duties here at SFU and couldn’t go to all the races I wanted (i.e. Mayo Invite), which was in the same time with out conference meet.