Hill Repeats for RTW Saturday

COVID-19, “The Rona Era”

Today is the second week of Road to Wellness (RTW) training” Endurance”. Of course it is muggy as all get out. I’ve been taking Aleve and my groin “ annoyance” is going away. I’m so thankful for science, scientist, and good drugs. When I arrived today, I wasn’t sure if we would get a large turnout because it rained last night and early this morning.

I wish we could give all of this rainy wetness to the pacific northeast to cool them down and stop some of those fires. Unfortunately, all the wetness is in the east coast.

When I arrived it was still early. I helped S from the BAA set up the tent S, surprised me with a sports bra. We had talked last week about the “ right” bra for running especially now after having breast cancer surgery. I mention that I can’t have anything near my incision, The “ underwire” band needs to go below it. We went on about bras, running, and boobs last week.

S was extremely gracious and got me this amazing bra. When I asked her how much, she told me not to worry about it. I know Sports bras aren’t cheap. The free ones we got last week from Trailblazher bra run were $50. S ,told me she gets discounts and she got it from the outlet mall. I hugged and thanked her.

Slowly, people started to show up. We had a good number of folks, as usual. Today we found out we were going to do 10 hill repeats. That means running up and down a hill 10 times. This is good for strength and building those calve muscles. Hills makes stronger and better runners.

Again, we are doing this in the mugginess of the morning. I wasn’t sure how my body would react because I haven’t done any hills in over 18 months. We are doing 10? I just had to go slow and listen to my body. This was the first time in an extremely long time.

We did our warm up stretches and then the warm up run before the hills. Coaches gave up tips…Run on your toes, learn forward, swing your arms, and coming down is recovery, jog. Ok.

I eased into it. I didn’t have music. I was doing this nature. I felt like I would never get to the freaking top. It seemed like it was a mile. I could be wrong. Then making it down was lovely. This was just one. Nine more to go.

I wasn’t alone, the different groups were going up and down as well. There was constant support and encouragement. I ended up in the middle. I was running ahead of my group but I wasn’t able to keep with with the next advanced running group.

No groups did 10 repeats. I did three and others were able to do between three and six. I think the coaches under estimated the time it would take in the hour and fifteen minutes duration we have for training.

Now I have a baseline of what I can do and how to proceed from here. I was aware how my right boob hurt. I’ll need to put a ban-aid on it as a barrier between my breast and the bra.

Despite the muggy, I did some hills.