yesterday and today...

Well, I found out the kids will be running the 800 at their first meet (April 12), so we've had to up the ante on the running portion of practice. They've been doing a lot of 50 and 100 meter sprints, but not too much longer at one time. Yesterday after our warmup and stretching, I told them we were setting a goal to be able to run for 6 minutes without stopping. Some of them can probably already do it--in fact, they ALL probably can, but they haven't developed the attention span for it yet. It's like me on the treadmill; I can run an hour outside without any entertainment except the scenery, but put me on a treadmill and I require a fast-paced, engaging show like "24" to watch just to get through 40 minutes. They easily run close to a mile at some practices, but it's broken up into segments so they don't realize it. So we started our 6 minutes as an interval workout. They ran for 1 minute, walked for 30 seconds--repeating this pattern for 6 minutes. They all did amazingly well. My two 6 year olds got bored with the length of the 1 minute intervals, so I had to push them along a bit.
After they finished, walked a bit and got water, I let them do a couple of relays--mostly because they were asking to, and I didn't want to discourage a good thing.
Then I asked them if they'd rather end by lining up and racing the length of the field or by playing foxes and hounds. "FOXES AND HOUNDS!!" All the younger ones immediately yelled. Lia, 11, the oldest one out there, was bent over catching her breath. She stood up looking slightly horrified and said, "What were our choices??!" She had really run hard for everything we had done so far, and was the only one old enough to value the easier choice over the funner one. I smiled and told her sorry, but she was already out-voted.
We did about 4 rounds of Foxes and Hounds and they all ran hard to the end.

Yesterday I biked on the stationary for 70 minutes. I went 23 miles. I did some pull-ups out on the playground with Brandt. I can only do one at a time--pull-ups have never been my forte'. Today I ran 43 minutes. My legs were feeling tired so I took it pretty easy. My left hip was feeling a little off when I got back, so I took some ibuprofen.