Wow what a good week, and man it felt good to get that 11 miler our of the road yesterday, and it was tough, I was right at 1:49, so not too bad.  I have figured out a trick, to making long runs more bearable.  Run early, early in the morning.  Why you might ask, 3 reasons:

• It is Cooler, although I still think it was 100% humidity with no rain
• Sunrise, tell you what seeing the sunrise, gets me every morning
• Your body still thinks it asleep until mile 6.

Let me spend a second on the last point, because there has to be something to not being able to see where your going, seems to make the run go faster.  For some reason, I really did not feel fully awake until about 1 hour into the run, and then it was just a quick 5 mile run and I was home.  Although I do have to admit the loop and turnaround at the house was no fun.  My course was basically a 5.5 loop from house, and I did that twice to get to 11, so it was a good route, but turning around and going back out not all that fun.  

This weeks fun song, takes us back to the 80’s  with some sugar from Def Leppard

I have been asked what my cross training looks like, and why not just rest on Monday?  Let me tackle the second part first, the day after your long run is a very important day of recovery.  Noticed I said recovery not rest.  It is all about active recovery, and working the lactic acid out of the muscles.  I train on Monday’s mainly to prepare my legs for running for the week.  So I do not go real hard, but enough to wake them up.   So my workout this morning looked like this, it was about an hour long.  None of the weights I chose where near my max, once again just look at the cross train day, as a bit of a strength builder, and tune up for the week (next week I will talk about my upper and core):

• 15 minutes Elliptical machine (get legs loosened up)
• Leg Extensions and Curls (with push ups between sets)
• Leg Press
• Calve raises
• 1 leg assisted squats
• side lateral lunges
• Ball Hamstring Curls
• walking weighted lunge with a shoulder press

This weeks schedule:

One of my good friends, Kevin (who I have talked into running 13 with me next Sunday) sent me this inspirational link:, as promised here is the some bonus inspiration:

Have a great week and remember with anything in life:

"if you want to do it, all you have to do is do it"! 

Registration still appears to be the same from last week: full is at 65%, the half is at 77% and Goofy is at 70% registration!  http://espnwwos.disney.go.com/events/rundisney/wdw-marathon/