Training Log - Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Enough with the cold temps already. Really! Rich and I met up during lunch to finally get back into our speed and hill workouts on a weekly basis. This week, a hill workout was on the training schedule and we found a nice hill at the end of Indian Creek Greenway to use for this purpose. We started the workout with a 1 mile warm-up run on the greenway, which would be followed by 10 sprints up the hill with each sprint followed by a recovery jog down the hill. Finally, we would run another mile on the greenway to cool down.
The wind was really cold and our lungs were already hurting during our warm-up. The first uphill sprint was next, followed by our first recovery jog back down. One down, nine to go. After the second uphill sprint Rich was cursing me already, followed by the third sprint and a curse for the hill, followed by the forth sprint. At this point, Rich had no energy left to curse anything. Actually, we had no air left to do any talking, let alone cursing. Our recovery jogs felt shorter and shorter. As our energy diminished, our downhill jogs became faster and faster, because we did not try to slow ourselves down. Funny how that works. With 4 sprints up the hill to go, Rich was certain that we only had 2 or 3 sprints at the most to go. Sorry, Rich. We kept going and somehow breathing as well. After the eighth sprint, I was certain I was going to leave last night's dinner on the side of the road. Recovery came slower and slower and the bottom of the hill approached faster and faster, only to have to turn around again for another sprint uphill. Our speech became slurred and the conversation consisted of one word exchanges, where each of us would have to fill in the ten missing words. Richard's "Walk"..."Bottom"..."Hill" actually meant "Let's walk all the way down to the bottom of the hill before we start our final one mile cool down run". No further explanations necessary, I was right there with him and knew exactly what he meant. I am just glad he had to utter the words and not me. Everything was an effort at this point. The one mile cool down literally functioned as a cool down in the worst sense of these words. It was cold and our exhausted bodies quickly started to freeze running into the wind. Once we finally completed our cool down, we were both glad it was over. By the way, we covered 5.5 miles during this speed/hill workout and we definitely felt every single yard of it.