9th Grade Track

::WARNING – BORING POST::

Back in January, I decided to add swimming to my weekly workout. At the time I was running about 15-20 miles per week. Because I wanted to know how far and fast I was swimming, I wore my Garmin 305 (my GPS watch that calculates distance, speed, time and heart rate) into the ocean. To make a long story short, that was the last day I wore it… it wasn’t waterproof. Any way, since I really like timing my runs and tracking my progress, and now my watch was dead, I quit running. Not too smart I know, but it was my days of mourning I guess. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided I would climb back on the bandwagon and get back to exercising. I picked a marathon in the future and planned out my weekly workouts and began the journey. At the end of one of my runs this week, I met up with one of my friends from the island. Naseer has run many marathons and ran in the 1996 Olympics. Naseer is now a coach in track and field. So we talked about running a bit and then he asked if I would like to join him the next day for a run. I did. It was on that day that he told me about a 5K run on the main island to be held in late June. He invited me to run. I said I would, but wanted to run the race in under 21 minutes. He looked at me and said, “You can run in under 20 min… I am 100% sure.” Well that got my attention. I liked the sound of that. We ran a couple more times this week. Today was our third run…. only he didnt run. Naseer had marked off the starting area by dragging his foot across the sand and stood there with a stopwatch in his hand. It had been a long time since I had run on a track. It reminded me of my old track days in high school when I had to run through cotton fields for resistance training. I went to a small school out in west Texas. There were small plants and weeds growing in the sand on the track. I did 10 rounds with every other one being 1:45 min and the recovery laps being 2:45 min. I was tired at the end, but then he made me do push ups and sit ups. Uh, yeah, I haven’t done sit ups in a really long time. When I came home, Angie asked why I had sand on the back of my arms and on my head. I told her about the sit ups and she said that she thought I had fallen down. Ha ha very funny. So we will see what Coach Naseer has for me tomorrow. I told him that I will do whatever he says and not act like I know more than him. I keep reminding him that I am 10 years older and a lot heavier. He reminds me that my legs are twice as long and I get to take fewer steps. Well we will see. I’ll keep you posted. I still plan to run the marathon in December, but hopefully a lot faster.