We want to be as forthright with you all as possible.  We want to let you know everything we do.  However, we now have more than just us and you to consider. We are part of a team lead by a team of coaches.  Everything we do is no longer our intellectual property.  We cannot, in good conscious, share property that isn’t our own.  We’re currently in the process of speaking to everyone involved, and we’ll hopefully know exactly how much we can share by the next Week in Review.  But, for this week, you’re going to have to excuse us if we leave out a few details.

Ian’s week:

Last week was another good one. I’m got in three workouts (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) plus a long run so I’m feeling especially productive! I know I mentioned how nice it is to be running with teammates but it’s been so long since I’ve had a group of guys to run workouts with. College was the last time, really, because in Mammoth even though I was on a team, I rarely had more than one person to work out with and often I ran alone. So you’ll have to bear with a little more of my gushing about how wonderful it is.

On Tuesday I did a fartlek with all the OTC distance guys, Thursday I did a cut- down tempo with most of the group and on Saturday Kevin and I did a track workout. The hardest workout of the week was Tuesday’s so I was a little flat the rest of the week, but everything felt smooth. I ended up with 630 minutes of running (I’ve found minutes are a better gage of volume than estimating miles) for the week, which is probably 90 or 100 miles.

The real news of the week, however, is that we finally got a dog! She’s a one year old Border Collie/Cattle Dog mix and her name is Kep. We picked her up from her foster family Sunday afternoon and we love her already. She got to go for her first run with us today and she was great. She’s a tiny little dog, only about 30 pounds, but she’s built perfectly for running. I know she’ll be a real fixture in our lives and therefore this blog, so I hope you have the same love for dog stories that we do.

Julia’s week:

My calf feels great, my runs are smooth and i am feeling fast.

This was my first full week of practice with the team and I am glowing.  It’s such a good and contented feeling to know that we are in the right place, that we made a good choice.  We had a team meeting on Friday, all 21 boys and 5 girls of the OTC. It was just an informal gathering about the whens and wheres of daily practice, but I could barely contain myself. I can’t exactly put my finger on what’s so great about being part of a team, but I like it.

We’re not all on the same race schedule or in the same sort of shape so, because Coach Rowland runs a very individualized program, we’re not all together every day. This week we met twice with the whole team and the other days with a smaller pack.  On those days Ian ran with a revolving cast of about a dozen boys, and I ran with Sally Kipyego.  If you don’t know Sally, then you don’t keep up with elite running.  Sally ran 14:52 for the 5k a couple weeks ago.  That’s 3 miles at 4:45 pace.  My best is 15:33, which is 4:59 pace.  That’s a big difference.  We’ll talk more about that later, and about how lucky I am to have the small and spectacular group of training partners that I do.  For now, I’ll just say I’m tired.

I didn’t run with her every workout.  I did a little, however, and I spent a lot of time looking at her back.  Even that was exhausting. I did run most of Tuesday with Sally and afterwards, on the cool-down, got to chatting with Kevin, her husband.  Kevin told me I needed to run my easy days “as slow as possible,” and then proceeded to demonstrate a pace that I’m not sure should be defined as running.  So, that is what I did for the rest of the week.  It was a little embarrassing.  But, I am remarkably healthy, happy and ready for another week of battering.

Monday-AM 50 min easy

PM-30 min

Tuesday-AM 20 min warmup, drills and strides

30 min many-paced fartlek on wood chip

20 min cool down

PM-30 min

Wednesday-AM 55 min-

Thursday-AM 15 min warmup, drills and strides

6 miles of tempo pace, broken up with 1500m pace short sprints

15 minute cool down

Friday-AM 30 min easy

Saturday-AM-15 min warmup

long tempo

15 min cool down

Sunday-AM 90 min easy

forgive us.

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