Week 17 of 24: Training for Run Amok 50 miler

Welcome to the world that is training with a pulled chest muscle!  You don't realize how much you use those muscles until one of them wants to leave your body in protest.

Monday:  Rest day.  2 miles with the girls at GOTR.  We have some girls that truly want to be runners this year and they are doing amazing jobs.  We stuck with our 4 minute run 1 minute walk scheme and it was HOT, but many of them stayed right with me (trying to stay at a 12 minute or slower pace) and they did it!!!!! I am having SO much fun this year with this group of girls!

Tuesday:  10 miles.  This is about the max I can get done before I need to stop and take the kiddo to school.  I was treated to another beautiful sunrise and lots and lots of wildlife.  I had decided to invest in another very nice headlamp and  I was excited to see how it performed.  My friend Cindy recommended the Fenix HL55 with 900 lumens and boy did it not disappoint.  We pretty much didn't need Robin's head lamp at all, and we saw so much wildlife that is probably always there but not usually in view.

my new head lamp lights up the entire neighborhood

Wednesday:  5 miles.  After working all day at Coleman Electric and then all night at KSU, I did NOT want to get up.  I was so tempted to cancel and go back to bed but with Robin waiting on me and no other time really to fit a quick run in, I had to just do it.  The wildlife was very active this morning and we saw a deer, some foxes, and one stupid cat that thought the dogs would be fun to meet.  The coyotes down at the river were singing the song of their people, which is both neat and scary to hear.  They generally stay down by the river, but you just never know, so we made sure to talk loudly for the rest of the run.

Andrew's first time at pizza shuttle, a grad student hang out for cheap and good pizza

Thursday: 7 miles.  Rockin Robin did 5 with me and then i traded out Stella for Boom and headed out solo.  He was SO happy to run and he pretty much pulled me for a solid 2 miles.  Kind of nice at the end of my run to have help!  Boom was all over the place at times, but mostly out in front pulling where I want him to be.

Friday:  Rest day.  I entertained the thought of trying to get my 3 hour run done so I didn't have to fight the weather/race Sunday, but I was tired and i wanted to be 100% for my 20 miler.

Saturday:  20 miler.  We had several weather reports saying rain all night and possibly all day.  Some had storms in there as well, but I figured I would get up, look at the radar, and then make a decision.  It was very humid, but with a cool wind blowing, and as long as you were headed south, the wind made the humidity less painful.  I did a 10 mile out and back with Robin and then headed back to re fuel and get another 10 out and back.  The interesting clouds kept me worried about the weather and the humidity made me very watchful of Stella.  There was oddly no water on the roads, even though we had rain the day before.  Glad i had her water in my bladder so she could drink when she needed to.   Of course the heavy pack irritated my pulled chest muscle by putting a ton of pressure on it, but I just tried to not think about the pain and solider on.

Sunday:  Well...I was suppose to volunteer for Konquer the Konza, our local 25k/10k out at Konza prairie.  This is a big money maker for Konza and I either race or help with it every year.  Due to the crazy weather forecasts of locally heavy rain, not only did they have to re route the race to stay out of water crossings, they also had to move the start time back to noon.  Andrew has tutoring at 12:30 and we had a meeting with the tutor that i did not need to miss. I reluctantly told them I couldn't help and luckily my spot was more of a cheer spot than a formal volunteering spot.  This freed up my morning to get my 3 hour run in, but when I got up at 4 am, the radar looked horrible, so I went back to sleep.  Back up at 7 am to see what we could do.  I had two choices.  I could try and get most of my run done before the second wave of storms hit or I could just wait till post Andrew's tutoring and pray the clouds and cooler weather stuck around. I waited till after Andrew's session and while we had periods with sunshine, it was mostly cloudy with a cool breeze. Fall, are you there????  Stella did about 10ish with me and then boom did close to 5 with me.  He did amazing so once again, I can't wait to get him more mileage and get him built up for longer runs!  He is turning into a super awesome running dog!

So nice to have a normal week.  Looking forward to making to to the TAPER!  4 more weeks with a cutback week thrown in!!!!