This past Monday I logged into my RunCoach account to find this waiting for me:
My RunCoach speed workouts for the most part are usually pretty simple, x number of x00 meters @ x:xx pace with x:xx jogs, or sometimes two of those with 30-40 minutes at marathon pace sandwiched in between. In any case, pretty easy to glance at, quickly commit to memory, & execute without too much thought. We don't tend to do "ladders" or "pyramids" other fanciness very often, so this one threw me off a bit.
Not a great week for me, guys. I had a couple of solid workouts but that's pretty much all I can say. Things were going just fine until Tuesday morning when I was rear-ended on the way to work. I was driving in the far left lane at normal freeway speed when some dude slammed into me at what must have been 90-100mph without even trying to stop. My car skidded all over the road and I was just lucky I was able to keep it from slamming into the freeway divider or careening into the other lane & getting hit again.
Oof, running a bit behind getting this one up. Progress, not perfection, right?
As I've started actually-for-real training for this race & occasionally chatting with other runners about it, people keep bringing up the course. Like "Have you ever run the course?" "Have you ever been out there on those hills?" "It's a really tricky course, you know." "OMG those HILLZ. Watch out for those HILLZ, man!"
And I'm like, "Okay? I train in San Francisco?" I mean. No disrespect to the Bostonians out there, but I did live in Boston for three months and, dudes, we have different definitions of what hills are.
Because we need to have other goals in life besides running ever faster and longer and more batshit crazy pants races, I started reading (or listening to) one classic novel per month back in 2014. Originally it was just a one-year resolution, but I enjoyed it enough that I decided to just keep doing it until I got bored or it started to feel like a chore.
(I'm a lot smarter now than I used to be.)
So, BEHOLD! The classic novels I'll be reading in 2018:
San Francisco, CA* (299 nights, apparently)
Chino, CA (1 night)
Sacramento, CA* (2 nights)
Fort Worth, TX (3 nights)
Paso Robles, CA* (4 nights)
Irvine, CA (2 nights)
Tahoe City, CA* (6 nights)
San Antonio, TX (5 nights)
Cypress, CA (1 night)
Volcanoes, HI (3 nights)
Kona, HI (4 nights)
Honolulu, HI (3 nights)
Riverside, CA* (6 nights)
Shasta, CA (1 night)
Concord, CA (1 night)
San Jose, CA (1 night)
Palm Springs, CA (2 nights)
Tracy, CA* (4 nights)
Arlington, TX (6 nights)
Spokane, WA (8 nights)
Bodega Bay, CA (3 nights)
All listed cities are those in which I spent at least one night between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2017, with * denoting those cities in which I spent multiple non-consecutive nights.
Hey hey friends! If you're reading this, then I assume you've successfully navigated the maze of Christmas carols and awkward gifts exchanges and cheese plates and champagne toasts that is The Holidays and arrived safely on the other side in good ol' 2018.
We spent Christmas in Spokane with Don's family, then celebrated New Year's by getting the heck out of the city and up to Bodega Bay for a few days with friends. I did my best to keep on my regular training plan through all the craziness and *mostly* succeeded, though there were a couple of snafus. Now that things are back to normal, I'm in the thick of week four, cranking out mile repeats & 2Ks at HM pace & whatever else RunCoach throws my way.
In January 2017, I started the year with a nearly empty race calendar, just a March half marathon (which I flaked out on) and a September 10K because of a cheap re-run offer from the year before. After CIM 2016, I felt a bit exhausted and extremely unmotivated to seriously train for anything. By early fall I finally pulled it together long enough to race a pretty decent half, but by & large it was a fairly lightweight year in terms of training & racing.
Not so this year! I'm not sure when it happened, exactly, but at some point my 2018 running year got super booked up. I'm even (gasp!) a race ambassador for something this year. (For which race?? You'll have to read on to find out!)
Happy 2018! (I mean. We can all hope, right?)
The first 22 posts in my reader are all 2017 retrospectives, so I'm going to assume you don't need to read yet another of those. Instead here's a list of most-read posts from 2017 that more or less sums up my year:
