The Art of Running in the Dark

Please consider supporting my effort to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through participation in their Team-in-Training program.  I am training to run in the Canyonlands Half Marathon on March 19, 2011.  You can support my effort by pledging contributions to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society on my Team-in-Training web page at: 

http://pages.teamintraining.org/rm/canyonld11/jkromer_LTN

All contributions are tax deductible.  THANK YOU!!!!!!

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Tonight we had our first "track night" for Team-in-Training.  To say that it was a bit of an adventure is an understatement!  When I first heard about "track night" I assumed that we would be running under the lights at some high school track.  I was wrong!  We were running on a track but in the DARK.

In reality running in the dark wasn't too bad!  Our eyes quickly adapted to the dark and it was pretty darn easy to see where we were running.  The more difficult aspect of "track night" was what we were doing.  Technically it is called threshold training, but from my days running track in high school I remember it being called interval training.  The training plan was to run one full lap of the track at about 80 -90 percent maximum speed and then walk a half lap.  This pattern was to be repeated 8 times so that we would cover a total of 2 miles running and 1 mile walking.  The purpose of this exercise is to increase the max speed that you are able to run over a distance.  

To say that this exercise was hard is definitely an understatement.  It was brutal.  Running a quarter mile at near full speed is killer and each time you are complete with one lap you feel like you want to puke.  Thankfully no one in our group this evening puked, but we did push ourselves very hard.  In the end, running in the dark turned out to be pretty tough but an excellent exercise.  I am looking forward to next Tuesday to do it all over again.

Besides running Zack got some help this evening getting Christmas presents for Nancy and me.  He was so thrilled with what he got - I thought he was going to blurt it out.  He has a really tough time keeping secrets like that.  But now that the excitement of the shopping is done I think he will calm down a little about it and be able to keep the secret of what he got us until Christmas day.

Hope everyone had a great Tuesday.

Thanks and peace to all! ~ J.

FYSRD!