Mount Misery circuits: -3 miles warmup from the Lower Lot to the foot of the "mountain." -Up and down the hill x 5. I did them straight-on, meaning on the same trail up and then down the other side and then turn around and back up and down, repeat. The #5 means the number of times I hit it hard up the hill but in reality I did 2.5 full, end to end 'mountains.' The length of each side was different. Side #1 (longer side) uphill repeats were as follows: 5:30, 6:15, 6:13 Side #2 (shorter side) uphill repeats were 3:15, 3:30. -With up and down, my GPS had this workout segment at 5 miles or so. -5 miles cooldown 13 mile workout ---------------------------- This was hardly a Canova-Hudson hill workout; both those guys stress short, very steep bursts, very fast. This was some sort of hill/mountain-man crazy extravaganza. I just hit the uphills very hard and used the downhills to recover completely. It was more legs and less lungs. My legs are complete hamburger right now. I felt horrid going into the workout and almost bailed on it when I looked up Mount Misery for the first time. My legs are not really fresh at all. All I can say though is that sometimes just throwing yourself at a workout and doing something regardless of how it turns out can lead to a release of competitive testosterone after your first repeat; before you know it, you are face down gutting it out, hellbent to push it hard again and again; time and sweat begin to fly and soon the workout is complete. I learned from this. Don't bail on a workout half way. Do the damn thing. Be Zatopek and run some repeats slower, but do what you are supposed to do. Cut no corners, shed no tears, make no bullshit excuses. -------------------------- The framer of the Magna Carta had a Constitutional Convention after the Continental Army suffered at Valley Forge and changed #7 to just "Recovery workouts are real recovery workouts." I used to have a blurb about 7:30-8:00 pace but that's all gone. I think I can recover at quicker paces and one of these days I plan to actually wear a HR monitor and see what 6:45 pace gives me for a HR. I will try to use one and run a recovery workout at 70% max HR (around 130 for me) to see how it goes. -------------------------- My first car was a 1967 VW bug. I bought it when I turned 16 for $500 from a shady character named 'Vince'that was part con-man, part tough guy, part B-grade porn star, and perhaps, part Blue Velvet-ish drug dealer. The car was a piece of junk. It had a newly restored-engine, but the electrical system was half 6-volt, half 12-volt. Something tells me 'Vince' was also part car thief too. It contained the following features and my fixes next to it: 1. No floorboard -- Dad and I made a 'bridge' across the floorboard with boat fiberglass and then somehow attached seats to the fiberglass. If I got into an accident, I would have been launched into outer space. 2. No gas pedal -- I hooked a huge Lincoln Log from my brother's frontier playset to the gas pedal wire. 3. No operable windshield wipers -- so driving in the rain meant sticking your head out the window, but it was the Bay Area, so it was all good except in the entire month of March. 4. No stereo system. "Bass" was all the rage back then. Cars used to thump bass so bad that they'd rattle glass in houses miles away. I was friends with a band so we used to cruise with the drummer in the back pounding on his bass drum. More about the car later.... -------------------------------------------- I'm not doing a 2nd workout today. I have some tenderness on my left foot on the top of the foot that has me a bit worried. It's not something that progressed in the workout. In fact, it is ever so slight but troubling nonetheless. A little barbarian wasteland searching tells me it might be tenosynovitis, b/c it's gritty where it's tender, or maybe tendonitis from my Mizuno Wave Phantoms that I laced up too tight on Sunday...it's not sharp pain so I'm not freaking out. -------------------------------------------- So back to the car.... The entire system--electrical and mechanical--was a case study in the chaos theory. Routinely it would just stop. The engine, the lights, the turn signals, everything, would just cease to work all at once. Usually this happened when I was going down a hill or at maximum speeds. I'd have to get out of the car, open the front, jiggle the battery, open the back, and then pull out the magic wire. You see, sometimes the ignition refused to work as well, so my dad rigged up a wire to the back where you would ground it to metal to turn the engine over. My fastest unclocked 200m runs have been chasing down the steep Benicia hills after my bug when the emergency brake--itself prone to weakness---would fail on me. I almost had it down where I could jiggle the back wire, start the car and then jump in all in about two motions. I'm not done. Vince sold it to me with a couple extras--one was a massive chrome muffler cone thing that you could install if you so desired. I so desired one day because I thought chicks would dig it. I didn't know you needed a welding torch to install a new muffler, and me being the stubborn ass that I am, I tried to the do the job without one. So the cone barely hung out the back and just starting the engine on idle would summon our entire court to the street to find out what F-16s were doing in peaceful and avant-garde Benicia. I'd throttle the Lincoln Log, tap the bass drum a couple times and roll down the street announcing my arrival in all wavelengths of the sound spectrum. Probably the best "what in the hell" moment in the annals of the Benicia Police Department occurred when they pulled me over in my bug going 50mph in front of the High School--enroute to Taco Bell and the newly constructed skate park with my friend, George. The officer approached my bug, tapped the exhaust cone thing with his boot, knocking the wads and wads of duct tape and a few token screws aside, scratched his head, and looked in at me through the open window. On the floor of the bug--I mean sitting on the floor in no seat--was George. I hadn't put a passenger seat in yet so I just sat my visitors on the floor--Cambodian boat people-style. Naturally I had to step out after this. I was all sweaty palms and nerves and in getting out, I knocked the Lincoln Log out of the gas pedal cable. I got my ticket (requiring traffic school big time) and in order to leave the scene I had to reach down with my hand and pull the cable while George--kneeling up on his haunches now--directed me to the nearest parking lot where I found a phonebooth and raised the white flag of independence by calling my parents. My last memory of this piece of shit was hearing my dad tell me excitedly over the phone when I was at West Point that he sold it finally for $200. The test drive was waived luckily and the poor folks that bought it were seen by my parents later in the day pushing it down First Street in Benicia.