Charlie Brown On Skates

Team practice today, we had some of our faster guys show (Jim R. and Murphy Quinn is back from school) so the pace was fast. I dropped at my usual spot on the big hill at around 23 minutes but picked up with Margo and Sadie Grace, an excellent skater who has trained for the Olympic team (her sister Mary is on the team) it was her first time out this year with us. She has skated very, very well in the past for Rainbo.

I think I have mentioned before that our training area at the Sears Centre is great, lots of slow tough grades and a couple of nasty hills (one challenging hill in particular). Thanks to Margo (one of the greatest training partners ever) I got my butt out for a second full lap today. So double the hills, double the fun right? I tried to push hard on the hills today and I think the interval training helps with that. I’m also really concentrating on my weight transfer and hip/knee drive which seems to be really helping me to maintain speed.

Hopefully the training will continue just like this. I would have liked to have done a full marathon today, but we were pretty beat at the end. We ended up doing 21.59 miles in 1:27, not too bad with all the hills and with getting a butt kicking early on with the fast pack - it’s hard to make the initial recovery from that.

Tomorrow I’ll try and take it fairly easy and do a recovery skate. Starting to seriously consider doing the Belle Isle Marathon, will have to see what the schedule looks like.