Rabbit

Before anything else, I need to give a big old Fenton welcome to Ava Grace Huntley. Ava was born perfectly healthy on Friday night and mother and daughter are both doing swimmingly. Justin, however, reports that Ava's little finger is numb thanks to Justin being firmly wrapped around it. Congrats guys!

So as I mentioned in my last contribution, I'm training for a marathon. Training's going pretty well in general. I hit 22 miles last week with a long of 8 miles. Not a bad place to start from, but probably not the best. We'll make it work. Some of my workouts this week have been insane, though. I have a little bit of an agressive rabbit.


No no no...not THAT agressive rabbit (bonus points to any reader other than Justin and Neal that can name the scene and the weapon used to vanquish the mighty beast).

My rabbit is actually my running partner Gerry, a buddy from church that lives in the neighborhood. Gerry's in good shape and loves to run like I do. We meet 4-5 mornings a week to train. However, he and I couldn't be more different runners. Gerry's built for quick, powerful speed. He definitely leans toward the sprinter side of the the runners spectrum. Given my height and lankiness, I definitely fall more toward the endurance side of things. I can still move, but Gerry's going to beat me in a sprint most of the time. It's generally a good running partnership because on the long runs I push him and on the sprints he pushes me. Well, the rabbit took it to a whole new level this week.

We decided to run some mile intervals - mile warm up then alternating mile sprints with mile recovery jogs (3x) and then a mile cool down. For reference sake, when I ran the half marathon in February, I finished the race at an average of 8:45 per mile. The 10k not too long after that I finished in 8:02 per mile. My tempo runs are usually in the 7:30 per mile range. Well, last Wednesday morning, good old Gerry and I took off on our first hard mile and I could tell we were hauling. Little did I know exactly how fast we were moving. When I hit the lap button on my watch after that mile I almost had a heart attack. We had covered that mile in 6:34 - almost a full minute faster than my previous fastest training pace. We both agreed we should probably slow it down just a little. So, Gerry took the lead again after our recovery and we pushed and pushed through the 2nd mile - 6:40. Some slow down. The final mile started up and I was hurting, but there wasn't a chance I was going to let Gerry finish the workout alone. No less than 4 times in that mile did I seriously consider stopping. Through the pain I made it to the mark and put in a final lap of 6:48. I know you're supposed to go negative on intervals and any hard training run, but I'm sorry - there's no way I was going negative off of 6:34.

So, now is the time that I'm supposed to come up with some witty closing to bring this post to an end. Unfortunately I can't come up with anything, so I'll leave you with a tip on slaying the vicious rabbit seen above.