weekend recap

It has been a while since I have updated my blog which feels weird but I do have two race reports half done... Mostly I blame the insane weather last week. It got up to 106 °F on Tuesday and stayed well in the 90 till the weekend so when I was away from the AC at work the last thing I felt like doing was turning on my laptop.
Anyways.. Training has been going really well. I had a week full of tempo and hill repeats which was extra challenging in the heat. But with a lot of gatorade and ice I got through it all with out any real problems. I do find it kind of funny that the first week I get to do a lot of tempo work it was so hot.
Luckily it cooled down to mid to high 80s over the weekend for my long workouts. On Saturday I got the ok from Kainoa to tag along with laurie on her long brick workout. So we got started around 7am to get out before it got to hot. Laurie mapped out a great route: out the Marymoor trail to Woodinville then a right onto Paradise Lake Road, to Mink Road to Union Hill into the Valley and over to the Beaver Lake Tri course and then over the Plateau and back to her place. It was a great mix of hills and a little bit of flats in the middle. She had ran 20 miles the day before so I was able to keep up on the flats and my legs were kind of tired from the full week of intervals so it worked out perfectly. My nutrition was the only lack luster part. I have not really found a replacement gel since Accel gel changed their recipe.. so I ate a hodgepodge of stuff and the Cliff shot turned my stomach pretty bad. Thankfully with the heat and hills helped settle my stomach.. But I never really felt like I was very well fueled. Oh well I got time to keep trying things and hopefully will find something sooner rather than later.
Once we got back we headed out on the East Lake Sammamish trail for her :60 min run off the bike.. I only had to do :30 but figured it would be more fun to tag along with her. Since my nutrition was not perfect on the bike the first :30 running out were a bit rough. It was hot and I was way under fueled. Thankfully we ran toward Whole foods and was able to run in and refill my hand bottle with cold water and even just stepping in the AC for a min helped so much. So the run back was way better and we even picked up the pace the last couple of minutes.
The best part of all was once we were done we immediately jumped in the lake to cool off. It felt SO good. Not to mention Eric had just made fresh bread and they had cold chocolate milk ready.
So after a snack and short visit I headed hoem for an ice bath and what turned into a 3 hour nap with Toko (my cat) till Kyle and I headed to his Mom's pace for dinner :)

Now since I decided to tag along with Laurie on Saturday I moved my long run to Sunday.. I knew it would kind of hurt since it was a 2 hour run and the past 2 weeks I have been more focused on shorter stuff and then with the long brick the day before..I headed out around 8a and decided to run flat so that I could at least survive. Laurie was nice enough to let me run from her place even though they would not be home. So I ran the East lake Samm trail again. I did not want to have to carry more that my hand bottle so I did 2 :60 min loops with whole foods at the :30 min mark.
My first loop felt surprisingly good. I stayed in my low heartrate zones like I was supposed to and kept a nice little pace going. I did find out that my hand bottle did not seal very well anymore so my hand was getting covered in gatorade :/ but at whole foods I filled my bottle with plain cold water and it was fine..
I headed back out on the second loop and I forgot to grab a gel so by 1:30 mark I was starting to hit the wall. My legs were tired and it was getting warmer so I went into whole foods and got a pack of luna moons to eat with the 3 cliff blocks I had. As I headed back I did not feel good and my pace slowed a lot. I wound up motivating myself by running for 10 min and then let myself grab a few black berries along the trail and repeated this till I was done. I immediately jumped in the lake to cool off and drank a recovery shake before heading back home for an ice bath. I ate a little bit of left overs and headed to my Mom's house for a Garden party :). Toko was very annoyed that i did not stay home for a nap.

All in all not to bad a weekend and time to bring on another week full of training :)