Training is getting the way of blogging!

Yikes, I've been neglecting my poor readers (all three of you!). It seems that 20 hours of training on top of 40 hours of work and uncounted hours of cooking, laundry, and staring at the ceiling thinking "Yea gods, I'm tired," doesn't leave me much time to blog.

Last week had some pretty momentous workouts - on Wednesday I rode all the way up Cypress for the first time ever and my coach was super excited at how well I was doing at the top. I felt pretty strong, unlike the time I tried it last summer and ended up in an absolutely vile head space as the effort hurt so much. On the way down I hit a new max speed (which I won't mention here as my mother might be reading - Hi Mum!!) and caught and passed Jessica, one of the seriously super fast people in our group, which was quite cool.

Thursday's run was the "1-2-2-1" workout, doing 1 and 2 km pieces at pace. I was supposed to be going at my 10km pace but I was feeling so good, so fast and so smooth that I went hard and posted some pretty great times. My last 1km piece was about 4:35 - NOT even close to my 10km pace.

Going hard on the run felt great at the time but caused havoc after - once again highlighting why we're supposed to do these workouts at pace. My run on Friday morning was painful and slow, I didn't want to be in the pool at all that afternoon, for my ride on Saturday my legs were heavy and I had the "flat tire feeling" ("I can't be this slow, my tires must be low on air") and the run following the ride was just plain tough.

It's no surprise that Sunday morning I wasn't feeling motivated to get up. After I'd hit the snooze button the customary number of times (3) I started to lever myself out of bed. I could hear the rain outside and all I could think was that I had to run for three hours it. Just as I was reaching to turn my alarm clock off the sound of the rain changed from a steady pitter patter to a pounding roar. I hit snooze one more time and hid under the covers, needing another 9 minutes to hide from the day ahead.

I finally got myself out of bed, fed, into my gear and out of the house. I picked up my co-cop car and drove to Kits Beach, cursing at the road closures - 4th AND Cornwall were closed - what was going on? The rain seemed to keep coming down harder and getting worse. I was in the car waiting for Teresa and Mary to show, unwilling to commit to the day by getting out of the car, and sat staring at the tent on Cornwall and the aid station in front of it.

Tent? Aid station?? Oooooohh - mental light bulbs went off - it was the Scotiabank half marathon.

Suddenly I had no problem with road closures, or rain, or being up early. I got out of the car and ran up to Cornwall. I missed cheering the lead runner but got there as the second place man whooshed by. I stood in the shelter of a bus stop and chatted with two women waiting for their children to go by and we cheered and yelled as the sopping wet runners went by. Teresa had to call me on my cell to get me to the meeting point.

We decided to run first and swim later as we weren't sure we'd ever warm up if we went into the ocean to start. We ran backwards along the half marathon course, looking for friends and cheering everyone on. We must have looked pretty nutty as it was hard to tell if racers were laughing with us or at us but our cheering seemed to be appreciated. Once we had encouraged the last runners/walkers we were about 30minutes into our run and I was feeling pretty good, the mental lift of watching and cheering the race had a definite physical benefit.

The run was more of a mental challenge than a physical one, especially after Teresa stopped (she only had to do 2:15) but I felt no overwhelming physical fatigue, just lots of aches and pains. While the aches and pains aren't good, the lack of fatigue was quite cool.

I swam afterwards in Kits pool as I wasn't keen to go in the ocean alone. Swimming after running felt fantastic - it soothed away the aches and pains and I relaxed and had a nice easy swim.

A nice end to a hard week.