Here's One For...

... All you dream analysts out there. Last night I dreamt I was running in the Columbus Marathon. I knew I had a very good chance of achieving my goal of qualifying for Boston so I was running hard yet confidently. The interesting part was that the course had been changed to run through some of the buildings in downtown Columbus. One building included a McDonald's. A McDonald's with a play area. A GIANT play area. And the course had us climbing up the giant indoor jungle gym and sliding back down the huge slide. Being a good rule follower, I removed my shoes as you're supposed to do when playing in the playground. I made good time going up to the top and was able to make the return trip on the slide just fine. But when I reached the bottom I couldn't find my shoes anywhere. I thought for a brief instant about just forgetting them and running in my socks, but decided to search for my shoes instead. I looked all over the place but could not find them. By the time I gave up the search and decided to finish running, it was about 9 hours after the start and the race was over. Workers were dismantling all the fences and tearing down all the arches and banners and such. I never got to finish and I missed my BQ.

So I'll take from that either A) Avoid McDonald's on race day, B) don't be afraid to keep running if for some reason I lose my shoes on race day, or C) don't put too much pressure on myself to achieve a certain goal, because ANYTHING can happen on race day.

In other news, I have been very busy lately and haven't made the time to keep up with reports. So to catch everything up, last week saw back-to-back days at the track, as this week will as well. Last Tuesday I was running 2 mile repeats with Connie and some others at Clagget. Nothing terribly fast, just 7:30 per mile pace or faster. Then on Wednesday we did the heavy duty speed work at Root, 7 X 800m repeats. We had a fantastic head wind down the back side of the track which really added resistance to the training parachute Ladd brought. We took turns wearing it for an 800. The legs were burning and the lungs were screaming with that thing on. Wow!

Saturday we met at the Hinckley Reservation for a 20 mile group run. We ran trails. I wasn't expecting trails. Somehow I missed that part. It would have been nice to have a second pair of socks and shoes available seeing as how I had one foot miss a rock at a creek crossing and go into the water early on. But it dried out and there was no harm done. I didn't know about any of those trails we ran. The park is MUCH larger than I was aware of. We did two laps of what was supposed to be a 10 mile loop, but was probably just under. At least the Garmins registered it under. (Of course the Garmins were losing track of the satellites in the trees and weren't getting a good reading.) Then we did a loop on the all-purpose trail, another 3 miles. And then for good measure we did a loop on the gravel hiking trail around the lake for another 3 miles. We ran for 3:15 to 3:20 and covered about 23 miles. I believe it was more, but that's what I'm going to call it. What a great run that was. I definitely need to do that more often. There were so many hills! A perfect training course to get stronger on.

Sunday I made it back to the pool for the first time in what has been too long. I was tired from the long run, but not too sore. I was hoping to swim at least a mile. But after starting, I just was having such a hard time I thought about cutting it to a half mile. But at half a mile I decided to not cut it short yet and do another quarter mile. After those 16 laps I decided to just push myself to finish the final 16 laps. It was a weird swim. The pool was packed. There was a scuba diving class in the lane next to me and I could see them when I would be down on the deep end. That was different, looking down and seeing a group of people directly below me.

It's a nice sunny day today and we should have great weather to run tonight. Hopefully tomorrow will be nice as well as it's back to the hard-core speed work.