1st Day Kenyan Way Spring Training

Wow what a difficult way to start training today. Did I just rhyme, well that was unintentional :) The morning started off pretty rough. In the 60's and wet. When I say wet, I mean it was drizzling pretty noticeably. So much so I decided to take off my shirt because I didn't feel like running with a wet mop on. Eventually the rain slowed and it didn't turn out too bad. Even though it was wetter than desired, there were quite a few people out. I didn't hang around long enough in one spot to look closely, but I think I noticed a lot of new people, or at least people I didn't recognize. My personal goal was to run a total of 9 miles with the hill work in between. We ended up running the hills for about 20 minutes straight with half of the path slow jog and the other half up hill at full speed. I don't have any speed stats to report but I did run pretty hard. It at least felt like I was moving pretty fast. Just looking at my Garmin and thinking back to last year, I think I ran faster last year. But that's ok, plenty of time to hone the speed. As I was running I was feeling all kinds of muscles I hadn't used in a long time. Many of my movements were inefficient because I started to feel some pain underneath my toe because I was pushing off too hard. I also was tightening up too much and not being fluid with my motion. Eventually I eased up and let the speed come naturally as the legs loosened up. I'll have to remember to ease up next time. My running has been so controlled the past few months. No sprinting, no hard quarter intervals, no mile time trials. So I have to shake off the rust and re-learn. Afterwards I cooled down with Geoff and Andrew.