Cross-Training Run

Since my calves have felt all knotty for the past couple of days, I REALLY didn't feel like running today. Especially since our coach, Ramon had told us last week that our fun runs were over with. (Although I can never tell when he is joking or when he is serious).

But when I got to the park I found out that we were starting with an easy 3-mile run around the park, to see places we probably didn't know existed in the park. We were all going to run together as a group instead of our individual groups. Then, when we got back, the advanced group would do two laps around the lake and the intermediates would do 2 laps around the lake. I thought this sounded perfect!

Plus, I met my mentor, Gina, who seems really really nice. In fact, she ran next to me the entire time and we chatted the whole way.

The hard part of the run was when we stopped at every mile to do some circuit training exercises. We did squats at every one. I HATE squats. BUT I probably need to do them because it's my quads that need a ton of work (and it's my lack of quad strength on my right side that led me to my knee problems). All of the mentors started moaning about cross-training runs.

Apparently, Coach Ramon has these cross-training runs where we will do hard core circuit training within the run. I've had two mentors tell me that it is the hardest thing that we do in training and that for the whole week afterwards you feel sore. They both now have personal trainers to help them do this all the time so that they aren't sore when we start doing these runs. They also said the hardest part was after the little cross-training bit getting back into the run.

In some sick way, this made me actually look forward to cross-training runs. I think it is because I KNOW they will help me run faster and I know that they will help me build muscle. Besides I am such a slacker when it comes to any kind of cross or weight training, so I think this will be good for me.

It was cool to do the 3-mile loop because we ran on trails and hills as well as paved pathways. We ran to the highest hill in the park but we also saw some things that I didn't know existed in the park (like waterfalls).

After that we did two 1.6 mile loops which didn't seem bad at all. I guess I could have done the third with the advanced group, but I'm trying to let my body recover until June 1st like Coach Ramon suggested.