Saturday, January 19, 2002
Workout: 8 Miles: Warm-up from Huntington to The Rise, run hard from The Rise back to the Water Tower, cool down to the park and back
Time: 36:17 for 5.5 miles Weather: cold during warm-up, sunny after
Since running up the trail was a gradual uphill, Fernando told us we would be going pretty fast back downhill especially the first mile, which was clocked at about 5:30. When we got out and started, we were running really fast and I did feel the downhill. But after the first mile, I wasn’t that tired, but we had to stop to get out of the fence at The End. The End is literally a fence with a hole in it, so it’s almost impossible to just run by or jump over this part. And that’s where I caught Andrew and passed him. I’m pretty sure Ha caught him a little bit later as well, but I think he just ran with him. So during the rest of the run, like many of my other runs, I ran with the fear of being caught and passed. It is a real motivation when you think there is someone running up behind you. But you don’t want to make it obvious by constantly looking back, so you only do it every now and then.
I also saw Felipe up ahead of me the whole way. I regret not trying to catch him because, if I just surged a little bit, I would have been able to run with him and like I said before, it’s so much easier to run with others than alone. At about Camino or Longden, I felt that if I were to be passed, it would have been too sad, since I had ran the rest of the run without being passed. For the rest of the run, I kept trying to surge, which was hard being that I was running alone and all. Either I was really dying or I had really bad cramps, but running Live Oak was really slow. But I was able to keep up my pace and finish about a minute ahead of the runners behind me. This was a very good run for me with regards to time and finish place. And it was a different workout then we have had before. We usually run to a street and turn around and run back that same path. This time we drove to the starting point in the trail so that the whole run was just running back. It was a nice change of pace.