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12 at Highbanks today. We had a decent sized group: Brian, Doug, Bridget, Nancy, Andy, Jen and Shannon. Brian and Doug took off and I ran with Nancy and Bridget. They both have marathon aspirations: that’ll be pretty amazing to see! I hung with them for the first lap (46:58) and then took the second lap slower, with Doug (he ran with Brian the first lap, they went like the wind).(51.xx) Bridget and Nancy did 2.5 laps, good for them! It’ll be great to see what they can do. It was interesting to talk about training with them, Nancy has her shorter distances down to a science so it will be interesting to see how she attacks the longer distance.

My knees were sore on finishing: actually my knee was cracking in the morning as I headed up there. I’m going to monitor it, because obviously I don’t want to injure myself!

Yesterday I sat down and figured out how I’m going to train for the next little while. I want to try to do 15+ on Saturdays (I actually considered doing 15 today but figured I didn’t need the added stress on my system), one tempo run and maybe a speed session a week. Recovery runs on Friday and maybe one other day, depending on my time. I also NEED to get back into doing core work!!

We went for hot chocolate afterwards, which was really cool. Last year I never really did that with the group, b/c I already felt guilty about being out running every Saturday morning. This year I want to really enjoy the social aspect of it as well.

Oh, one thing that was interesting: when I was running with Bridget and Nancy, we were talking about racing, how both of them race on their own, not worrying about others, just running their own race. Then when I was running with Doug, he was talking about how it would be cool to get a group together to run the Crown King Scramble together. I ixnayed that right away,saying I wanted to run my own race. It’s just a different perspective I guess, but I really think it is important to race according to ones personal abilities. That’s how I trained for Steamtown, and why it went so well. And in part why I was crabby in Detroit: it wasn’t my race. As Nancy was saying, we each have our own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s important to work within those constraints to do the best you can. I’m not as fast as alot of the people I train with, but I recover well, I can go long. So that requires a different strategy.

Wow, it’s been along time since I ran on a Saturday morning and had the rest of the weekend to myself, it’s kinda nice!