Winter Training Nov 11, 2007 @ 18:52
As the Fall Ultimate Frisbee season came to a close, I found myself incredibly busy. I had been playing 2 or 3 days a week for the entire summer and fall leading up to the two Fall tournaments.
The first tournament was for the club teams. My club team is made up mostly of people that I work with. This is the team that I started playing ultimate with and that I have the most fun with. In the year and a half since we started playing, this was our first opportunity to play in a tournament together, and it was great. We ended up being 2-2 for the day, winning our last game in a triumph of stamina and skill.
The second tournament was the hat league. The hat league is called such because it is made up of teams that are figuratively "picked from a hat." You sign up alone, or sometimes with a friend if you want, and you're placed on a team with a bunch of people that you likely don't know. The day of this tournament started out with a steady rain. With everyones equipment in bags and under tarps, we played the first couple games soaking wet. The rain cleared up near the end of the second game, and the weather was nice the rest of the day. My team ended up being 2-2 for the day this time as well. However, we lost our last game in a tragic failure of stamina, but we had fun anyway.
After the second tournament, I found myself trying to plan a Winter training regimen. As I've been running some 5Ks this fall, I thought about trying to build on that and attempt to run a 10K in the spring. I also have plans to do a fairly long bike ride in June, and I'd like to start trying to build up my distance on the bike. Both of these things are pretty difficult to do outdoors in the winter, so my plan was to do a lot of treadmill running and spinning classes until it warmed up.
As soon as I had settled on these goals, and started my trips to the gym this past week, my plans suddenly took a turn... up a steep hill. I received an email this past week from a coworker stating that him and some other people were planning on training for a half marathon that takes place in February. They were looking for more people to join in the training. As I am not really good at turning down challenges that seem just out of reach, I decided to accept. This means that I'm going to be replacing my relaxing winter training with an intense running training that will last the next 3 and a half months.
Right now I can run 3 or 4 miles pretty consistently. Over the next 15 weeks I'm going to hopefully build that into the ability to run over 13 miles in about 2 hours. I'm going to be doing this mostly outdoors in the freezing, snowy, dark northeast winter. I'll be learning a lot about my tolerances of cold, and how I can possibly run while wearing several layers of clothing. It will be an interesting Winter.
The first tournament was for the club teams. My club team is made up mostly of people that I work with. This is the team that I started playing ultimate with and that I have the most fun with. In the year and a half since we started playing, this was our first opportunity to play in a tournament together, and it was great. We ended up being 2-2 for the day, winning our last game in a triumph of stamina and skill.
The second tournament was the hat league. The hat league is called such because it is made up of teams that are figuratively "picked from a hat." You sign up alone, or sometimes with a friend if you want, and you're placed on a team with a bunch of people that you likely don't know. The day of this tournament started out with a steady rain. With everyones equipment in bags and under tarps, we played the first couple games soaking wet. The rain cleared up near the end of the second game, and the weather was nice the rest of the day. My team ended up being 2-2 for the day this time as well. However, we lost our last game in a tragic failure of stamina, but we had fun anyway.
After the second tournament, I found myself trying to plan a Winter training regimen. As I've been running some 5Ks this fall, I thought about trying to build on that and attempt to run a 10K in the spring. I also have plans to do a fairly long bike ride in June, and I'd like to start trying to build up my distance on the bike. Both of these things are pretty difficult to do outdoors in the winter, so my plan was to do a lot of treadmill running and spinning classes until it warmed up.
As soon as I had settled on these goals, and started my trips to the gym this past week, my plans suddenly took a turn... up a steep hill. I received an email this past week from a coworker stating that him and some other people were planning on training for a half marathon that takes place in February. They were looking for more people to join in the training. As I am not really good at turning down challenges that seem just out of reach, I decided to accept. This means that I'm going to be replacing my relaxing winter training with an intense running training that will last the next 3 and a half months.
Right now I can run 3 or 4 miles pretty consistently. Over the next 15 weeks I'm going to hopefully build that into the ability to run over 13 miles in about 2 hours. I'm going to be doing this mostly outdoors in the freezing, snowy, dark northeast winter. I'll be learning a lot about my tolerances of cold, and how I can possibly run while wearing several layers of clothing. It will be an interesting Winter.