Week-12: 9/22-9/28

-Wednesday (9/24): 5.5mi Hill workout @ Prairie Creek elementary school. It was my first time at this place and it had nice long hills which makes it ideal for hill workout. After about 0.8 mile of warm up, I did 5 hill repeats. Each repeat was about 0.37mi with ~60 foot elevation gain.

-Thursday (9/25):6 mile tempo run @ Renner Trail. I did an easier tempo run at an average pace of 9:11 per mile as I did a hill workout the day before. I usually take a rest day between 2 hard workouts as per FIRST training, but this week I could not do it as I skipped running on Monday and Tuesday. My HR stats are here.

-Saturday (9/27): 15 mile long run. I finally was able to join Greg's group (8:30-9:30pace group) for this week's long run. The group was planning to run at an average pace of 9:15 per mile, which is just about what I wanted to do. We started off at Mockingbird DART station and ran toward the Whiterock lake. By about mile 5 we joined the lake and had a great run around most of the lake. I saw our other Team Asha runners, who are running with other pace groups. We took a water break at mile 12 and then finished off well back at the DART station. Our route can be found here. My stats for the run are, avg. pace 9:25 min/mile and Avg.HR=150.

-Sunday (9/28): 24 mile bike ride on Chisholm & Bluebonnet trail. I got on my bike after about 10 days and it felt good. I started from my home and got on the Chisholm trail in couple of miles. It was a nice and long trail when you combine Chisholm and Bluebonnet trail and I could bike about 24 miles in ~1:45. My average speed was less than what I would have liked, due to the frequent breaks at the many places the trail crosses the roads, but other wise it was a nice trail to either bike or run. I am thinking, next time I might bike on the Whiterock creek and lake trails from my home, which would make the round trip about 30 miles.

Week-4 (7/28-8/3)

-Monday 07/28: Hill workout in Valley Ranch, Irving. 10 of us had a great workout. We started off with 1 mile warm up, followed by 6 repeats of a short hill (0.1mi, ~100ft). We finished it off with a 1 mile cool down.

-Wednesday 07/30: Track workout at Ranchview High School, Irving. Another tough and fun workout on the track. 11 people showed up and we did 6x400 tracks with a mile of warm up and cool down. The weather was great as we had light drizzle for most of the run and had the pleasure of seeing 2 semi-circle rainbows. That was a pleasure and I wished I had my camera.

-Thursday 07/31: An easy 4 miler at La Villita Lake.

-Friday 08/01: Ice skating at Dallas Galleria. Our second try at ice skating and it was lot of fun. I managed to do 10 laps and Sravanthi did 6, without falling even once! This can very well be a good cross-training workout if we manage to learn. I can't wait to start our classes in 2 weeks.

-Saturday 08/02: Whiterock Lake loop from Winfrey Point. Ran with DRC group for ~9 miles at 10 min/mile pace. Around 20 Team Asha runners showed up for this hot run in the upper 80s and some humidity. We had amazing breakfast following the run, thanks to DRC coaches who were kind enough to get some bagels and fluids. I loved having chocolate milk after the run.

To sumarize, great start to the training, especially Irving folks of Team Asha. They are a motivated bunch and have amazing spirit.
Go Team Asha.

2008 Team Asha Dallas: Week-3 (07/21-07/27)

Full and Half marathon training with DRC started on 12th July. Details of the training program are here.
-Full-marathon schedule calls for 23 weeks of training
-Half-Marathon schedule calls for either 17/23 weeks of training , depending on if one is training for DRC Half or Whiterock Half.

- Unfortunately I missed almost 2 weeks of training. DRC groups meet on Saturday AMs for long runs and Wednesday PMs for Hill/Tempo/Interval runs.

- My first run with DRC was on 26th July and I joined the Full 9:30-10 pace group. It was a nice feeling to run with a large group again after so long. My first experience of running with a big group was with Team Asha SV in 2004. The big group made the 6 mile run quite easier, except for the slight hills towards the end of the run.

- There were quite a few Team Asha Dallas runners in various pace groups of DRC and we all met up after the run, stretched well and went for a nice breakfast at Einstein Bagels as always.