Monday, February 20, 2012

Journey to Leadville - Byrne - February 20, 2012

180 days until the 2012 Leadville Trail 100 Mile Run....



Good to be back on the blog although I can't complain at all about being gone for three days - I had a wonderful experience away at my Christian retreat - I plan to come back and write more tonight. If not, I'll try to cover it tomorrow.  So there are two things we need to cover here.

#1 - Following up from last Wednesday.... I mentioned that I ran 75 sets of stairs with Rick Fountain on Wednesday morning - that is typical for a Wednesday morning workout. What I didn't tell you is that I went back to do 125 more sets of stairs for a total of 200 on Wednesday. The reason I did it was to honor the men that I was about to spend the weekend with. It was a gift I wanted to give those guys who were aspiring to increase their faith life and get closer to God - I was trying to push myself beyond what I normally do to provide spiritual support for their journey. It must have worked because we had an incredible weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed it; however, I know that it was a life changing experience for many of these guys who had grown away from the church or were finding that their faith was not as strong as they would have liked it to have been. The previous high mark that I had on the steps was 110 sets so the jump from 110 to 200 was, I felt, significant. It was hard, but hard felt good, and I know I had some spiritual support from up above in helping me to finish. it was a great day!

#2 - Today's workout. As I mentioned previously, I took Saturday and Sunday off for my retreat. I had arranged with Rick beforehand to meet at 5 a.m. at the Y on Monday - we never even texted Sunday night - we knew each other would be there. I'm happy to report that we had another breakthrough day - I LOVE BREAKTHROUGH DAYS!!! It is such a good feeling to do more than we have ever done before.. The drill was pretty simple on paper - a little harder to execute.

1/2 mile warm up run
60 minutes on the treadmill, Level 10.0, 0 incline - 2 minutes on, 1 minute off - except for the final set in which there was a 3 minute run and zero walking. If this is confusing....

0-57 minutes Level 10, Incline 0, 2 minutes running, 1 minute resting
57-60 minutes, Level 10, Incline 0, 3 minutes running.
Total Running - 41 minutes; Total Resting - 19 minutes

Finished with 3 sets of 8 on the benchpress at 170 lbs. - we continue to improve each time on the benchpress as well.

Analyzing the run a bit, total run time was 41 minutes, a 20 second improvement over my previous best of 40 minutes, 40 seconds. Earlier I did an hour long variation of this where I was running 2:10 and walking :50 for the first 30 minutes but had to slow down to 2:00 run/1:00 rest and then 1:50 run/1:10 rest. Didn't start out as strong but finished stronger and feeling really good about this workout. Certainly was feeling challenged but Rick's continued encouragement kept me going - thanks Rick!

Until my next post, have a great day! DIG DEEP! 

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