After an exhausting night last night (See "The Gorge"), I wasn't really feeling like today was going to be a successful day (workout-wise). None of the guys 100% knew if we were going to have a hard workout today or not. Turns out..... we were.
Today was the day of the 3rd annual Wildcat Stampede Fun Run, a fun run in which the cross-country team hosts and provides assistance to any people willing to run five kilometers around our beautiful campus (hahaha that should have been on the poster). We met up at the Pavilion at 9am, as the race started at 9:30am-ish. We were given a course map and were suppose to select corners, to help guide the runners to make sure that they didn't get lost. The course wasn't that difficult to navigate because it was lined with multi-colored chalk arrows, which helped guide the runners around the "tricky" corners. The winner was the Track/Cross-country coach at the local high school (He ran a 16:45....not bad), beating out one of our alumni runners (He just wanted to crawl back into bed haha). After the race, we did a quick two-mile shakeout run. The run was a prelude for our workout later in the day.
Kevin had told us that the workout was going to be a "moderate-hard" workout. What he actually meant was "Your gonna run hard anyway, but we'll see how you guys are feeling at the moment." The workout he had planned for us was a fartlek-type workout. Swedish for "speed-play," Fartlek workouts utilize a combination of either race-paced (or in our case, tempo paced), intervals, followed by a brief segment of recovery jogging. It's like your standard interval workout, just without the breaks. The workout planned was three sets of 5:00 minutes at Tempo pace, followed by two minutes of easy jogging; nothing brutal, but a good quality effort. I feel like these types of workouts are better than just standard tempo runs because during tempo's, everyone tries to run with each other, yet during these, the paces vary. During the first two intervals, Manu, Scott, and Nate Minor seperated themselves (a little bit), from the main pack, with myself trailing off the pack. By the third interval, everyone was running "their pace." Oh, I didn't mention that we ran our Farltek over the Fun run course, so we could see what the racers were experiencing during their run earlier that morning.
After the Fartlek, we did some hill repeats over at Brick Hill (Our favorite hill during Track season). We did 4 x 200m (Which is to the crest of the hill) with an easy jog recovery back down to the bottom. These weren't "All-out" efforts, just a nice, hard pace to help develop some leg turnover. After four, my legs were feeling pretty tired! The accumulation of the Fartlek, plus the hills, in addition to the prior week's workouts, have been slowly taking their tolls on my body. It's ok though. I feel good now! Just needed to stretch a little bit and get in a nice cooldown. All and all, I had about nine miles on my day.
Later that evening, we all decided that we were going to hangout as a team at one of the older guy's apartments. Not only did we have enough guys to play a small "Three vs. Three" basketball tournament, we also consumed delicious banana-based treats, such as muffins, pies and cakes (We had a lot of leftover bananas from the Fun run and Kevin told us to take them.) The evening was a total success, even without some of the freshman girls (I don't think they like to socialize haha.) We all enjoyed ourselves and, more importantly, enjoyed each other. With the guy's team being comprised mainly of sophomores and juniors, we have just shy of two more years with one another. It's cool that we can all hangout as one big group and just have fun, not only like teammates do, but as normal friends do as well.
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