Double Duty

I will start by saying how much I LOVE rest days. The only drawback is that I can not eat unlimited amounts of food without guilt. I go from eating a cheeseburger for breakfast and quesadillas and beer for dinner without thinking twice, to eating a banana and toast for breakfast.

Yesterday I pulled a double workout and loved every minute of it. I did my very first track workout in the morning. It was much different than just getting outside and running. It was a group so I had people to compete with pushing me beyond what I would have done on my own. First - we started with a 1 mile warm up, four easy laps around the track. Then we got serious...it was 1200 m day. We did 4 sets of 1200 m runs. The most difficult part for me was to figure out how to pace that. Each set is only 3/4 of a mile so I wanted to run pretty fast - but with only a 3 minute break in between how quickly could I recover? By the third set I figured out that I could do about an 8:30 pace and have enough left in me to pick it up a bit during the last half lap. I don't know if that was the right thing to do but it felt right. After the 4 sets we did a 1 mile cool down...so I started to shuffle around the track. I looked at my handy Forerunner to check my pace and I was "shuffling" 10 minute miles. This normally feels like a decent jog - but after running faster felt very slow and easy. Hmmmm...interesting how that worked.

At 6:30 yesterday evening I met with my run club. On Thursday's they break into three groups - 3 mile, 5 mile, or 7 mile. I went with the 5 mile group and we had a nice easy run along the riverwalk and around downtown Naperville. I seriously considered not doing it since I already got a workout in - and as always I was proud that I fought off that urge and completed the planned workout.

Reward time!!! Yep, I headed straight from the run to the Foundry to watch my volleyball team play while relaxing with a nice big Summer Shandy and chicken quesadillas. I love the rewards:)