The Longest 40 Minutes

This heat is just killing me. I think yesterday was especially bad though because my side of the office didn't have air-conditioning all day. I was sticking to my desk. (Oh yeah, and did I mention that it was 97 degrees)? Anyway, the whole thing put me in a bad mood, so the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was run my workout, which was 40-50 minutes easy.

As soon as I got home I put on my workout clothes, because I knew that if I didn't I would convince myself to not run. Luckily, because of the air-conditioning thing, I had been hydrating all day.

Bill ran with me, and let me tell you, Riverside Park has never seemed so small. It seems like when we got to Harlem it would have been time to turn around (20 minutes). Instead, we had only run 10 minutes. So then, not only did we have to double back, but we had to run even further. I was avoiding hills because my calves have been really screaming at me lately. I also wanted to avoid the river. Even though you get a nice cool breeze from it there are also no trees, so the sun really beats down on you. In retrospect though, this was kind of stupid of me, seeing that it was 8pm and then sun was pretty much setting. At any rate, if you are trying to avoid hills and trying to avoid the river, and trying to not stray too far downtown there is really not that much of the park to run. And we all know how much I hate loops. It made for a very long run.

But, I was very very good and did all of my stretches once I got home.

Today is supposed to be just as hot. AND we have a cross-training run. All I've heard from the mentors and coaches is that these workouts are really difficult. We will be teaming up with the intermediate group tonight. However, we have a longer run than they do. We have to run down to meet them before we start the workout. Then we divide into two groups. The first group stays with the coaches to do cross-training exercises while the second group does an out and back run for 12 minutes. Then we reverse. We will do this a "few" times according to Coach Ramon. Who knows what this means? He also told us that the cross-country course had 1.5, no 2.5, no maybe 4, no maybe 10 hills. After running it I would have said closer to 10. :)