6/6-8/14. rest/stretch. 3 miles and yoga. 9 miles.

Friday.  my rest day, but i hit the gym at 5:30am for some mobility work.  T will go the gym by herself any hour of any day, but she seems to love dragging me out of bed on my Friday rest day to go to the 5:30am class.  Must be revenge for when I used to drag her with me to the 5:30am friday class on her day off from work.  So I foam-rolled and band stretched and worked some mobility issues while she WOD'd.  it was nice to loosen up a bit, but i sure could have used the sleep.  at lunch hour at work, Mike Allsop gave a presentation.  Mike is an ANZ pilot and an adventurer.  He summitted Everest.  He ran the highest elevation marathon ever.  He ran 7 marathons on 7 continents, in 7 days. He gave an interesting presentation with a lot of pictures and video.  the primary message consisted of 3 points: 1. set a goal, 2. develop a reasonable plan, in bite size pieces, that will get you to your goal, and 3. never give up.  even if injury or fate causes a set back, get back up and try again.  He was a pretty cool guy.  His tales of Everest scared the shit out of me, though.  Not going to be on my list of goals, for sure!  But I won an autographed copy of his book, which I am looking forward to reading.

Sat.  early morning 5K trail run.  T's yoga class.  the trail run was awesome, as usual. since my last trip into Japanese Gulch, the ferns and plants and leaves have really exploded in growth.  i didn't recognize my way very often, ended up running some extra distance.  no problem, though, it was worth it.  and yoga, as usual, stretched me out, relaxed me, and aided in reducing my recovery time. 

Sun.  9 mile run.  this was my longest run in over a year, maybe longer.  really was a tough mental challenge to keep running past all my usual loop turn backs.  maintained an avg pace of 8:27 min/mile, which was exactly what i was shooting for on this run.  funny thing is, conventional wisdom says that you don't really see the true physiological benefits of a long run (endurance building) until after the first hour in. so basically I burned an hour on the streets, then had 16 minutes of productive running. that's truly discouraging.  some days its hard to envision that I will ever run a full marathon again, let alone in 15 weeks and 6 days...