Weekend at home, summary post

Thursday BIKE abt 32 miles in 2:10
Friday RUN 18 miles in 3:03 to, around, and from Catlin
Saturday rest
Sunday RUN 6 miles in 57 mins

Another summary post, hopefully I can capture all the details. It was a great weekend! I went home to help with the bakery grand opening celebration and modified my training schedule to optimize my availability to help out.

Thursday I skipped the group run and did a bike. I needed to stop by lab early and meet with Sam, so what I did was commute to lab and do my harvest, bike to FoPa with the plan to ride until meeting with Sam, round out my goal time of 2hrs, then commute home. I stopped by the VC lot and found IT and LC, talked with them instead of riding, so I managed an out n back on Wyd before having to rush back to the VC for Sam. The meeting with her was great, she shared some insight she learned while recovering from her surgeries and this gem was the real sparkler: don't pick a race goal as the motivation to recover, rather pick recovery as the motivation and once recovered then shoot for a race. Heavily paraphrased, but that's the idea. She suggested coming back to the coaching question after my October race, then picking a 70.3 roughly one year from that to train for. So looking at fall 2017 triathlons! She also pointed out a podcast I'd be interested in called Journey to 100. What an inspiring name, I downloaded a few for the weekend trip.

The rest of the ride I did in FoPa, two loops on  the path which took about 25 mins each. Felt  really good, love riding Puppy :)

Friday the goal was a simple steady state run, I was torn between running to Catlin and driving to Peoria to preview Farmdale. I should mention here that until Thursday night my plan was to drive to Camp Wakonda, which incidentally is NOT the site of the 100M but rather my July 50K. Duh, bad thinking there! To keep things simple and save myself the  2hrs of driving I stayed home, thinking I could run to Catlin, see how things look there, and if needed come home through SRock along the river.

It's 6 miles of mostly flat roads to Catlin, a boring but pleasant run. Yay for podcasts to keep my mind going, and for my soft peppermint candies every two miles (Thursday I found double-sized bags of them at the Dollar store! Score! Buy more!). The gate to the park was closed and the sign I saw on it said keep to the center of the road, 10 mph speed limit. I skirted by the gate and jumped on the first trail head I came to.

I didn't know what to expect from a "horse trail park". I was expecting more like Greensfelder -- tore up, poopy, single-track. Instead I found mowed, clean, manicured double/triple wide grass trails that wound through the trees. It was like running on a lawn! Some of the trails dead-ended at a short loop with a tree at the center. They were mostly shaded so a wonderful cooling off opportunity. Through trees, past a meadow, along cornfields, not at all what I expected! When I found a muddy dive into a creek I took it only to be quickly connected to the next manicured trail.

I bee-bopped along at one point along a corn field, and at one point heard a vehicle honking to flag my attention. It was a ranger -- that park wasn't open yet!? He said 9am. Ooops. He was nice, and I was terribly apologetic, and glad I wasn't a horse because he said that would have been worse (how, exactly, I didn't ask). I chatted a bit more and he said there was 14 miles of trails here. FOURTEEN! I never would have guessed so much, whoop! So much for thinking I'd need to add mileage in SRock, there's pee-lenty here. Speaking of which, I needed to pee and was now worried about doing so along the trail with the watchful eyes of a ranger who already had to admonish me, hehe!

Looped back along a few more trails, ate 1/4th a powerbar at 1:30, found an outdoor toilet, then turned for home thinking that 18 miles was a good goal. More powerbar at 2:15, still eating mints, and monitoring the water levels in the Camelbak. It was really heating up, not as hot as STL but definitely hot. I was OK, only 6 more miles. Stopped briefly to talk to Jess's mom who was out mowing, them home! Was a good 10m/m pace due to the mostly flat terrain, but still a solid 3hr run. Now I need to get that done on hills! This run didn't wipe me out or hurt much later, even after a 3+hrs stretch of doing dishes at the bakery.

Saturday I rested. We were all up late after the grand opening and I needed the rest. Still feeling good from the run. I had thought about trying to get a swim in today, but it was more important to spend time with family.

Sunday another run, the goal was to round out to a 40 mile week. Up the the school and back, felt great! I was somewhat disappointed on Monday to see that my training log showed only ("only") 8 hours of training for the week. No strength, just bike and run, and as usual that doesn't include bike commute time. 8 just sounds so short!