Crunch-Time

Good evening everyone. This weekend has been fun. I went to a few games, hung out with some friends, gotta good workout in, and found some more books to add to my long list of books I will get around to reading. It has also been a time of thinking... about many things. Those things being God, my training, my studies, and my freetime (that is to say my lack thereof in the coming weeks). I realized the other day that it has to have been at least six months since I have picked up my Bible and read a few passages from it. This disturbs me. In his sermon today, my pastor challenged all of us to read a book of the Bible over the course of Lent. This seems to be a very good idea and I believe that I shall do just that; the next question, however, is which book to choose? I've already read Revelation a few times, which is quite interesting. Although I'm thinking my selection shall be the book of Matthew; the reason being that Matthew is the primary book which Mel Gibson has used in his interpretation of the last 12 hours of Christ in his new movie. As an added bonus, this gets me back to reading the truly important stuff, which I have obviously overlooked for quite some time. And now I move on to my training. I'm much happier now that I've started running again and have, seemingly, bounced back from what could have been a really nasty injury (based on last year's experience). My first real test is gonna be this Wednesday or Thursday, as I have scheduled a 5-mile tempo run. I have no clue what I will clock in at, however, it will be a sub-6:50 pace... I will make sure of that. As for speedwork it's not something I'm entirely worried about right now. Any speedwork that I will be doing for the next 2 weeks will be primarily over longer distances, such as fartleks or mile-repeats. Saturday I got out to the track and got 4.5 miles of decent speedwork in, ladders mainly. Interestingly enough it looks like my progression towards the really "breathtaking" workouts will come right when I'm heading out to NH. Thus, I'm delighted to announce that I'm gonna get some of the best speedwork in with some ungodly hill repeats on the "hills" around my cousin's house. Frank Shorter once said that "hills are speedwork in disguise"....... I can't wait to put his theory and my legs to the test, cuz I plan to push my anaerobic and aerobic thresholds to higher limits than they have ever been to. I might eleborate on some of this stuff later in the week to bore all of the non-runners who read this :) ~ Rich