So Saturday was a huge day, woke up early then a 2.5 hour practice, took down the course IronTEAM signs, then immediately rush home to get ready for my bar crawl fundraiser MAN v BAR 7. The fundraiser lasted from 2pm-9pm officially, but stayed a few more hours until midnight. That’s 10 hours of drinking! Ok ok, my nutrition plan is waaaaay off here, but it was considered a miracle if I even showed up to the early Sunday run practice!
The route? Met at Ocean and San Vicente, run up San Vicente, Brentwood Golf Course loop and back, then an out and back towards the Santa Monica Pier if time permits. Yes, so many surprised faces when I showed up… but also surprised at other people that were at MAN v BAR too. So we did a warmup to 4th St up San Vicente, then back to stretch. The goal was to do a 7 mile minimum in 80 minutes for Intermediate, or 90 minutes for advanced. Started off thinking I’ll do the intermediate set, because in no way I consider myself advanced, but a funny thing happened to me halfway through the run – I actually felt great! Runner’s high? Maybe. It was also downhill for the second half. Not going to complain! I ended up continuing the run towards the Pier, and once it hit my turnaround for the 80, I figured, what’s 10 minutes more? I ran to the Pier, and by the time I came back, it was around 90 minutes for 10 miles! Much faster and further than I originally planned! Maybe I should do a 10 hour drinking binge before a timed run like this more! (Just kidding, coaches!)
Read More
I’ve been very good this week in keeping up with my mid-week runs. Monday at the gym, Tuesday in Brentwood, and then last night we had the second session of Track Training at Santa Monica High School. It wasn’t as tough as last week because this time around was all about keeping a consistent pace, for 20 laps. Coach asked us what our target marathon time is, then he calculated what kind of pace we should keep during our run. I want to break 5 hours for the marathon, so he suggested I finish each 2 lap set in 5 minutes. We did 10 total sets at that pace, with decreasing rest times. The first 5 sets were 3 minute rest peroids, to 2, to 1.5, to 1 minute. We didn’t realize how long were were running for until the end, because we got out of there at 9:45ish. So a total of 24 laps, including the warm up and cool down laps equaled 5.6 something miles. It probably went under the calculated 6 miles because I took the inside lane most of the time. 
We just started the third major section of our training in TNT. The first third was working on our base, where strength training occured, making sure our bodies will transition into longer miles nicely. The second third was all about hills. This time around, we started working on speed. Track training was at the Santa Monica High School, not too far from our Sunday meeting spot. 
Week 12 Sunday Run:
