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-11: 9/15-9/21

-Tuesday (9/16): I did a 6 mile Tempo run on Renner trail. Started the run with a mile of warm up as usual and then did 4 miles @ 8:35 average pace and finished of with a mile of cool down. After the race on Sunday, this run did not feel nearly as difficult. I need to get some biking done tomorrow as it have been almost 2 weeks since I did a bike ride.

-Wednesday (9/17): After a 2 week hiatus, I was able to do a 12 mile easy bike ride on Chisholm trail. Sravanthi and few other Team Asha runners did a tempo run.

-Saturday (9/20): I had to skip my track workout this week as there were high school football games going on at the local high schools. We had our usual long run at Whiterock lake. This weekend happened to be Tour De Fleurs 10K/20K race and most of the DRC group is taking part in it. Most of our Team Asha has decided to have a long run of our own and we started off a little earlier than the TDF and were running in the opposite direction of the race to avoid being over run by some 3000 runners. It was an amazing day to run with temperatures in the mid 60s at 7am and also with some mist cover. About mile 6, I started seeing the fast runners in the race and boy they were flying. I wanted to run about 15 miles this week at an average of 9 min pace. When I reached the TDF starting point after doing the loop, I have finished about 11 miles. I decided to do the last 2 miles a little faster (closer to 8 min miles) to have a strong finish. I ended up doing ~14.7 miles in 2:10 for a little under 9 min pace. It felt great and not so tiring, maybe because of the weather. This week I did not do my track workouts and also biked only once. But, I am still happy with the fact that I did a 15 mile run after a long time and it felt great. My HR stats are here.