Vegas bound!

New in 2014, Paula on Mo and the marathon, running in downtown NYC (super cool!), Cincinnatti vying for the 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials, Nick Symmonds, World Championship 5K preview, and Jordan McNamara.

Monday, August 5th - 6 miles.  Ran solo after work out and back towards Troy.  Legs were definitely tired from the long week, but motored along and ran sans watch, nice and easy.  Because the weather was so cool, decided to get a little bike action in and biked 10 miles out and back towards Home Depot.  Felt pretty awesome to fly through the ride, but my posterior end was killing me coming back.  Definitely gonna take some time to get used to my tiny bike seat (AKA rape stand).  No idea on time, but slow.  Breakfast - banana and apple.  Lunch - Chicken Pad Thai at Thai Kitchen - mmm.  Dinner - salad with bleu cheese and garbonzo beans, Lean Pocket (ham and cheese), and Cheez-its.

Tuesday, August 6th - 6 miles.  Early run with Crystal.  Out and back towards Troy, and I was definitely dragging.  Flew by this one, and picked it up coming in.  Felt great to get this one out of the way, but was already pretty humid in the morning.  We always say we are going super slow, but we never do!  49:07 total.  Breakfast - bacon, eggs, potato, banana, and apple.  Lunch - chicken salad sandwich, bowl of Cheddar Ale Soup at Granite City Brewery.  Dinner - 2 eggs, english muffin.

Wednesday, August 7th - 11 miles (2 up, 20x400 meter - 200 m in between reps, 400 m in between sets (sets of 4 - goal 84,82,80,78), 2 down).  SLU track after work.  It was nasty hot and nasty humid (90's, 70% humidity) and nasty sunny.  Warmup was rough, and I was already sweating profusely and starting to sweat just thinking about it, quite honestly.  I knew this was gonna be a tough one when I was struggling to hit my first 84 rep (went 82, but it still was a lot of effort), and made it through the first set but was hurting bad.  Needed to break this one down mentally piece by piece, so concentrated on each individual rep instead of the big picture.  After the second set, I literally had to walk my jogs and was just trying my best not to completely fall apart.  It became pretty evident later on that I wasn't going to truly nail this workout, and tried my best to speed up as I went through the reps.  I never had any problems with the first 200 of any rep - it was the last half where I was losing ground.  Anyways, eventually finished the workout, and was pretty exhausted in the process.  Legs were burning like no other, and battled through a tough workout on a hard day so for that I'm happy.  Thanks to Crystal, Heidi, and Coach Tim for their cheering!  Splits were: [82, 82, 80, 78], [84, 82, 81, 78], [85, 83, 83, 80], [86, 85, 82, 79], [86, 86, 84, 83 (ouch!)].  Breakfast - banana, small bagel and bacon sandwich.  Lunch - hamburger and apple sauce.  Dinner - McDonalds Chicken McNuggets and a Big Mac.  Not the most nutritious, but I was beyond hungry and it was late and needed some sort of reward for my workout efforts.  To karma's credit, the wait for my food was way too long, and they screwed up my order (thus the Big Mac), so I learned my lesson :)

Thursday, August 8th - 6 miles.  Bright (well not really, pretty dark actually) and early with Crystal on trails towards Troy.  Really humid, and I was pretty beat starting out.  First mile was 9:02, and did not feel good at all.  But eventually loosened up, and we negative split every mile coming in.  Tired when I was done, but very much glad to have it over.  49:22 overall.

Off to Vegas tonight for a guy's trip!  Have a few runs scheduled, and it is gonna be hot as hell but need something to work off the inevitable endless flow of brews :)