ice

The theme for today is ICE. Pretty much everything (major) I did today (Saturday) had something to do with ice or a derivative of ice.. I guess it makes sense given where I'll be heading in 48 hours.

My alarm/Blackberry went off at 5:30am, but it took six "snooze whacks" to finally get myself out of bed and downstairs. My wife and I have a deal that I can go for as long a run as I want on Saturday mornings, provided I'm home in time to make pancakes for the kids (our Saturday morning ritual). With an hour less time to run, I filled the remaining hour with some "quality" miles and got home at the exact moment my daughter wandered downstairs wondering where her pancakes were.. Timing is everything!

"In January this year, Wim Hof ran half a marathon (21 km) above the polar circle in Finland. He wore only a pair of shorts and no shoes. The ground (snow) temperature was 35 below. In a few months time, he'll try something along the same line on Everest's north side...."

Read more and SEE THE PICTURES of the "Dutch Iceman" here.

There's dedication for you!

Coach Bobby McGee and assistant Marci Roschke chip and shovel ice off the track so we can do our drills and 5k test. Kyle warms up. Eagles watch from the tree.

One good run is all it takes...then the world is suddenly a better place.

And today was the day. A five-mile time trial I had been dreading. Another key piece in coach Bobby McGee's assessment of us sub-5 milers, the instructions for this one were to go out and get steady state heart rate data. Not an average heart rate; Bobby wants to know where our heart rate settles when we are committed to good pace cruise mode.

Lately I've been feeling tired and grungy. I'm flying one day, wiped out another -- and there's no pattern to it. I gave a pint of blood on Thursday (or that's what it felt like) to fuel some tests to see if we can find out what's going on. Meanwhile, I have cut back training to just every other day, in a bid to help my recovery from whatever it is that is bugging me.

Happy Friday all!

QUOTE OF THE DAY
“He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.”
~Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

TRAINING
Feeling rather squirrelly after a day in the office……I head out to the Sanitas trail – headlamp switched on – tunes blaring….loud, louder, freakin’ L-O-U-D. Preferring always to FEEL rather than hear the music, I crank up the volume until my eyes bleed.