50 minutes and 3 sand dunes later....

Got up at 9-something today. Decided to go with the breakfast of champions, that being 2 slices of left-over pepperoni pizza from Bronko's. After that I had to clean up around the house (except for my room, which shall remain in it's unorganized dirty form as long as I occupy it). I next had a wonderful drive up to the dunes on what had been an exceptionally wet day thus far. After hearing the rain fall pretty hard last night and looking at the "beautiful scenery" off of 49, I was fairly sure the trails would be a mess. When I got there however, all of the sand was on the flat trails was packed down oh so very nicely :) . Sand dunes, however, never really change.... they are always a bitch. The run started out with a pleasant 20 minute warmup on the beach followed by some stretching. It was then time to hit the hills. Although trail 9 is quite challenging with its rolling dunes, it's nothing compared to the short but oh so very sweet agony and pain of Trail 8. Trail 8 is only about 1.5 miles long, yet it manages to easily be the toughest trail due to the fact that it is situated on 3 of the tallest sand dunes: Mt. Tom (192ft), Mt. Jackson (176 ft.), and Mt. Hidden (184). Even cooler, After climbing each of them, the trail takes you all the way back down to the base of the next one so that you can run all the way again, yay! Mt. Tom is really fun because you get to run up the longest set of steps I've ever seen outside haha. So I somehow managed to get through the entire trail, and took a little break to get back down to resting heart rate. After that I started off on my cooldown (or so I thought). As I was coming back from the cooldown I ran into Mark Fisher, former Morgan runner turned Portage runner. So I ended up doing all of the Trail 9 loop out to Furnessville and back at a decent pace most of the way. Now my legs are dead, and I am quite happy.

I've been reading up alot on the habits and training regimens of many of the great runners throughout the 20th century and many of them such as Lindgren and Elliot rarely, if ever, did interval training. I like interval training and will not give it up entirely; however, the much more simple and raw training philosophy of running yourself into the ground in a natural setting, such as the Cerutty's coaching method for Elliot, is even more appealing to me. Plus, I think that dune sessions that I have been running do a lot more for my legspeed than the majority of intervals that I typically do. We shall see in two weeks I guess.

After I ran I went over to Joe G.'s house in Hobart. It was a little too wet outside to play basketball. So we shot pool for a while and after that headed up to B&N. Saw an interesting book up there about Roger Bannister and Herb Elliot; now I have to find $24. The other book I'm looking to get is The Art of War by Lao Tzu. It's a book full of military strategy written hundreds of years ago. The Chinese, mind you, were the inventors of gunpowder and many other handy weapons. Got home after Joe's house, picked up Matt, and then headed back up to Valpo for some fine-dining at Fazoli's haha. Had a good time there with LP, Mike D., and Skippy (and Matt; obviously). We then went to B&N (my second time at one today, this time in Valpo). Found a book that just made me wanna puke. This sorry excuse for a "runner" who goes by the nickname of "Penguin," ironically enough, wrote the biggest load of crap for a runner's guide I have ever seen. Basically, his book was unintentionally written to strip running of all that makes it good and worth doing. The guy is a total wimp and believes that it is "OK to be slow and be proud of it." My favorite chapter of the book had to be the one dedicated to "avoiding the bad four-letter word: pain." Well buddy, I'm sorry, if you were a real runner and knew what real running was, there is a far worse five-letter word you would be trying to avoid: being called a "p-u-s-s-y". And that's my two cents. I'm now spent. Hope you enjoyed winding through this lengthy post. ~Rich