Lots Going On

So a lot has been going on. I'm still here in Oregon at the USA National Championships. This is a bit of a working vacation. The weather here is unbelievable. Running in Texas you just grow accustomed to having to deal with hot and humid weather. You wake up early or wait until late to run, but you tend to forget that people in other parts of the country don't have to deal with this torture. I've been keeping to my morning run schedule while here, but to be honest, it's cold when I run in the morning. If I didn't have other things going on, I could easily wait until 3pm and run (it was 68 degrees at 3pm today with 48% humidity). My workout this morning was 8x800m @ 4k-5k race pace with a 2 min rest [200m jog in that 2 min rest]. I really like this workout and do it at least every couple of weeks. In Texas I've been averaging about 3:14-3:17 for each 800m, though last time I did the workout I went 3:11-3:12-3:17-3:21 and quit because I felt like crap. Today I averaged 3:07.1 for each 800m and it felt easy. If I wasn't racing next weekend I would have kept going and run 10-12 intervals. Running is so easy up here that it's hard to explain. Any southern runner who has a chance to run up here for a few days in the summer needs to do it. There is a night and day difference. I have a 4-mile tempo run scheduled for Saturday. I can't wait!

I passed the 1000 mile mark for 2009 today. It took me 176 days to reach this and I'm on pace for 2080 miles for the year. As long as I stay healthy, I think I'll get close to 2200 once I begin to bump up my mileage in preperations for a half-marathon in January.

This working vacation has been a lot of fun. We drove about an hour and half yesterday to go to Florence, Oregon to see the Pacific coast. We drove through some very beautiful mountains in Western Oregon. It was overcast and misty once we got there, but we still played on a beach for a little while then went to eat some seafood (I don't really like seafood, but I felt I needed to eat some since we were on the coast). The meet is going well and I have to admit I'm little star struck. While hanging out in the coach/athlete hospitality tent I get to over-hear a lot of conversations between elite athletes and their friends/coaches/agents. It's quite interesting to hear what they talk about and what their attitudes are about other athletes. It's been fun so far.

I plan on running Pre's Trail in the morning and checking out the memorial where he died. I'm not a big Prefontaine fan, but just as every Muslim must visit Mecca at some point in their life it seems like every distance runner must visit Eugene and Pre's Memorial at some point.