"once you start to suffer... that's when the running begins"

That's my newest quote. Yup. I made it up on the run yesterday, and it's outstanding.

I had a pretty tough weekend of running, but i survived. Since I've been running so many miles and hours on the trails, I noticed that i was starting to drop a TON of speed when simply going out for a 10 mile easy road run with my friends. So I've made a change to my strategy, and will do more than 50% of my runs on the roads with Team Rogue making sure I still get in at minimum 2 trail runs a week, of which one must always be at minimum 3 hours.

I haven't run a pace faster than 7:45/mile since end of may.

SATURDAY

The team training for Portland Marathon in early October had a tough race simulation run.

After a 2 mile warm-up, alternate 3 mile sets at MGP and half marathon goal pace (HMGP) with a 1/2 mile recovery in between each set. Sounds pretty simply, but if you consider that it works out to 19.5 miles at faster than MarathonGoalPace it starts to give you heartburn.

sub 3hr marathon pace would be 6:50 for MGP and 6:15for HMGP. I'm no where close to that, so I chose to run with the guys training for a 3:20 marathon. I didn't have specific goal times in mind for myself, and just accepted whatever Kevin told me he wanted to do: Under 7:40/mile on MGP, and under 7:10 on HMGP.

Here's how we did:

Pace - M1-M2-M3

MGP - 7:27-7:21-7:30

HMGP - 7:21-6:27-7:08

MGP - 7:27-7:24-7:22

HMGP - 7:01-7:04-7:04

MGP - 7:37-7:56-8:03

OUCH. those HMGP's felt soo friggin' fast, I have no idea who I could hold 6:50/mile as my MGP before. Anyway, it goes to show how much speed I have lost. (but i'll gain it back before Boston 2010 in April, so no sweat)

There's a slight fade on the last 2 miles, which are attributed to me choosing to pull my friend along. Regardless, this was a huge success for me. I was REALLY hurting for the last 6 miles, but like I told Kevin and Michael on the 2nd set of HMGP's... "once you start to suffer... that's when the running begins"... and we definitely got a good suffering session in yesterday.

SUNDAY

I wanted to get 3 hours in on the trails to work on running on tired legs.

Dan had to be done by 7:30am, so I met him at 5:30am for a loop with Karma, then a big loop over to the hill of life to relaod on water at 7am, and join up with one of the Rogue trail groups. Dan took off to get home on time, and I ran mostly with my coach Steve. To make it to 3 hours, I ended up needing a roundtrip on the powerline including an up and down on the hill of death/hill of death's sister. The 0.8 mile powerline run back was pretty painful, and was probably a 12min/mile death march pace. But hey, I got it done, and deposited another 3 hour run in the bank account!

note to self: 3 sets of powerline in one run is not fun. This may be a great place to do 8-10 (horrible) repeats later on in October or November.

Total running : 19.5 road + about 15 trail = 35 for the weekend.