13 Straight Days

With the conclusion of this weekend I am on a streak of 13 straight days of training.  All of them have been pretty good.  Not one session did I want to back off or did I have to struggle to complete the workout.  If anything I wanted more.  Mentally, I am ready for more; I just hope my shins are up to the task.

Today I worked out twice.  The first session was an easy 3.4 mile cross country race that I did with my son.  This was the second year in a row that my son came out to do this race with me.  He was a trooper today.   It was very cold and windy outside, but that didn’t deter him.  He also kept on going after he developed a bad cramp in his side.  It looks as though it hurt so bad at times that he wanted to cry.  I asked him if he wanted to stop, but he refused to quit the race.  He was insistent on not being the last person to finish.  He must have felt very good when he finished, because he kept talking about doing another race that is coming up next weekend.  I am hoping he will still want to do it when the day arrives.

Later today I went out with my friend Chris for a loop around Prospect Park.  It was much colder and windier by the time we met in the park and it was also dark.  Chris hasn’t been working out much, so we kept a very slow pace.  That was fine with me, since I was just happy for the company.  We bullshitted through the loop and talked about how we were getting fucked by the state of the current economy.  I counted my blessings though as he has it a lot worse than I do.

Chris was only out to do one loop of the park, so after we completed a loop we said goodbye and I continued on.  I picked up the pace a bit and completed a second loop, several minutes faster than the first.  We these two loops and the race from earlier in the day, my total mileage for the day was around 10.5 miles and 33 miles for the week.  Not a lot of miles, but I am just building back up to a decent base and still taking it somewhat easy after the JFK 50.

In other news, I’ve been officially accepted into the Vermont 100 Miler for 2009.  I am going to try to be a bit more careful this year so that my shins don’t break down on me.  I want to make sure I get to the starting line this year.  My other concern for 2009 is getting into the NYC Marathon.  I don’t have guaranteed entry and this bothers me.  I have a streak going and I would hate to see it end.  I’ll have to figure something out.