Power Hills and the Drive for Five
March 15, 2010 | 1:22 pm
It's official. I'm a runner again. Two things happened in this past week haven't happened in years. First, I burnt a treadmill out. This is less of a reflection on my fitness and more so a reflection on the quality of certain treadmills, but it still happened. I've seen it happen a few times, if you've got the treadmill going close to 12 MPH on an incline the motor can burn out. It works just fine a few minutes later, but it just stops. This doesn't happen with newer treadmills. Well, maybe it does, but you have to be a lot faster than I am to make it happen. Regardless, I almost went flying over the front on Thursday. And secondly, I puked after a workout! Last time I managed to do that, according to old training logs, was June of 2006. But to be fair, it usually takes a much harder workout than the hills I was doing. And usually it's AFTER the workout. This time I had to cut the thing short. And I learned a valuable lesson about growing up: As you get older, what you do Friday night rears its head sooner at Saturday morning workout than it does when you're 20. If I'm going to do this properly, there can be no more late Fridays.
The hills on Saturday were a real kick in the face. It's been one thing doing workouts on the track, on the roads, and on the treadmill, but I haven't done a pure power workout yet. Short power hills used to be my favourite workout. I'm a very small guy, even for a runner, and hills and speed work used to be the only time I could lead a workout in Victoria. But the accumulation of lactic acid is something I am definitely not used to anymore. It's something that you really only deal with at its highest severity while doing 800m work, which I haven't done since March of '08. And it hit me harder than it ever has. It was awful. I can't believe I used to enjoy that stuff. I guess I'll get there again, but it would appear as though my pain threshold has gone way down in the last couple of years. I think I may have gone soft...
Tuesday on the other hand was a pretty good workout. Kilometre repeats with some of the Men-durance guys. Felt smooth and relaxed and I wasn't even sore the next day. I did sixty minutes on Wednesday to make sure I flushed all the junk out of my legs before my tempo run on Thursday. The next eight weeks are going to be tough; I'm doing a mini cross country season to try to get a little bit of a base under me before I start racing. But the Lung Run is in less than a month!
This past weekend were the CIS track championships and the boys from UVic completed the Drive for Five! No team has ever won five straight relay championships at CI's before and this year UVic looked very beatable. They barely won their conference championships and didn't even have the qualifying standard. They also weren't ranked in the top three. But the leadership on that team is incredible and they moved their way up from fourth to first and won the race by less than a second. My old roommate and one of my best friends Daniel Mallie became the first UVic runner to be named to the first All Canadian team five years. Daniel was on all five gold medal winning teams, starting in 2006 when he was a 17 year old rookie. He managed to go his entire University career without ever losing a relay at a championship race! I realize that Victoria is a long way away, but I just have to brag about these guys and our awesome streak that they kept alive this year.
