Trail Running Blog

4-Cities Run Deja Vu

Saturday, January 5, 2002
Workout: 1 lap around Arcadia Park warm-up, 3 laps around the Park, up Santa Anita Ave. around a block of streets, and finish at the top of the hill on Santa Anita
Weather: sunny/warm

I wanted to cap off this pretty successful week with a good hard run today. Unfortunately, it was not quite what I had in mind. Fernando’s last minute workout was very similar to the dreaded 4 cities workout a couple of months ago. The 4 cities workout is what the name is, a run through 4 cities. I forgot what 4 cities they were, but included Sierra Madre and Arcadia. It was a really bad workout for me, just because the conditions were not the way I was used to. Some of the things I didn’t like about the run: it was very long (I have always liked shorter distances), I didn’t know where I was going (there were no reference points, except a lot of phone booths), this was an ad-hoc workout, so my coach just named the streets we probably should have turned on, and there were no mile markers (so I had no idea what pace I was going at..probably really slow though).

The warm-up lap around the park wasn’t that easy to begin with, so I was already running behind the pack. Because they started off with a faster pace than I was used to, I was already running at a disadvantage. So I had to run alone the whole time, behind the pack as they were drifting away. If anyone has run alone before (without music), they should know how hard it is to do, it’s very discouraging when you know you could have been running in the pack. To make things worse, I didn’t even run the whole workout. I had just turned the street after Santa Anita and I was looking for the next street to turn on when I saw Fernando running back already. I asked him what’s up and he said that it was getting late (it had already been 50 minutes) and he told me to turn back with him. So I barely did half of the work out. However, all of the other guys were able to complete the whole workout. This was a really bad workout, and I hope there aren’t any more like these.