Rough Road is an 8.6 mile long dirt road with some difficult hills - of the 8.6 total miles, probably 6 or more of them are uphill, with a final steep hill of about 800m to finish off the run.
On Saturdays when we don't race we travel to Rough Road - it's about 7 miles from school. Today we increased the men's distance to 10 miles by starting 1.4 miles away from the start of the dirt road on a flat, paved surface. The women ran the full 8.6 miles on Rough Road.
The workout went extremely well for us - the weather was perfect - maybe in the low 50's when the workout began at 6:45 AM. Every runner ran his/her fastest time of the year for this particular workout, some by more than 2 minutes. All of the women met or exceeded the goal times we set for them and 9 of our 13 male runners met or exceeded the goal times set for them. 4 of the remaining 5 were close to their goal times and only one runner wasn't able to come close. He did, however, improved his best time by more than 2 minutes, so it was still a very good run.
Everyone was pretty pumped after the workout ended and started talking about how we are going to increase the distance to 11 miles for the next run. They ran great times last Saturday in our Memphis race and had 2 excellent workouts this week leading up to today's run, so their confidence is very high at this point of the season.
We have our weekly long run tomorrow morning at a different complex of dirt roads about 10 minutes from school.
Next Saturday we return to Jacksonville State University for 8K and 5K races. It's a course we already know from our first race of the season when the guys ran 5K and the ladies ran 2 miles. I would rate it a pretty fast course so we will be looking for some additional PR's to go along with those we ran in Memphis last week.
Long range forecasts are for good weather - cool mornings to train and no major rain to speak of. I hope it will hold for Saturday's race.
No comments:
Post a Comment