Dylan Lajoie Weekly Athlete Fall XC blog #4

 

Week of 9/8-9-14

 

Monday: Poland Corner Hill Repeats (5), Core Work

Tuesday: 40 Minutes medium, 6 strides

Wednesday: 3x1200, 2x800, 1x400

Thursday: 30 Minutes Easy

Friday: Race at Pineland

Saturday: Off

Sunday: 110 Minutes on the Roads

 

This week got off to an extra-fun start. I normally dread doing Poland Corner Hill workouts. This time wasn’t different. It is pretty much the most bad a$$ hill in Poland, and my lack of strength will kill me when we are doing repeats up it.

 

Instead it was much more of a confidence builder, a much needed one at that. On my first one I had my coach there to pace me through, and I felt like I was already getting up the hill with much more strength then usual, hitting the top still feeling good. He stuck around to pace me through the second one if I needed it, but I ended up passing him about a quarter of the way up. That sort of set the tone for the rest of the work out.

 

I got into a great rhythm, and felt like I could hit the hill with the same speed and intensity on each repeat. In fact my forth time up felt the strongest, and my fifth didn’t feel all that bad either.

 

The rest of the week was pretty solid, but I could definitely feel that workout on the legs all the way through. Come race time at Pineland I thought I would be able to hold pretty strong, but after the first mile of the race, I found that wasn’t the case.

 

I started off right on Alex Moser’s heels. It was fun getting a chance to pack run with York through the first half-mile or so, something I don’t get to do often. I started to break with the pack with Alex, and by the time we were hitting the first mile, the second pack was out of reach. I found that Alex was holding up well, and starting to gap me. Seeing this I went directly against my coach’s advice and tried to hang with him.

 

I was killing myself on the up hills of that course, trying to stay with him. Originally the game plan was to let him go if he tried to do that in the first two miles, and try to reel him back in, in the last mile. Being the impatient person I am, I wouldn’t let him go. By the second mile I had lost complete contact and was running by myself.

 

In fact I will use some Chuck Palahniuk styled writing here. Euthanization isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.

 

After the race I felt completely demolished. A lot of my teammate’s parents weren’t impressed with my vocab skills while I was getting my stuff together at the team tent.  Between the two of us, we usually go back and forth with each other in races, he gets the best of me towards the end of a race most of the time. I would of definitely liked to keep it closer, and try to use some tactics against him. When I thought about the race this weekend, and today on my long run I had come to the conclusion that it was completely my fault I had lost him that early. I knew going into the race that I had to conserve my energy on the up hill, and accelerate down the hills. It’s the only way to run well on that course. Instead I got impatient and decided to kill myself early. Oh well. Lesson learned.

 

Next thing I am excited for is October. Festival of Champions and the transition into the championship meets is always fun, but what is even better is that Nike will be releasing a few of its new Flywire model spikes. I will be spending a few hard earned checks on the Matumbos and Victories. The Victories are what I am most excited about, weighing in at a total of 3.4 ounces, with a modified Miler plate. Of course the great thing about the Matumbos is that in Kenya it means “a goat’s butt hole.” You can thank Bernard Lagat for coming up with that name, after seeing the hole cut in the back of the shoe. I suppose I need to get out more if the most exciting thing in my life is the arrival of new track spikes.