I’ve been thinking about doing some speed work, and I can't really do much at the "club" where the track is pretty short, so I asked my friend Don Dornfeld where he did his. He uses an enclosed soccer field in his town, open for walking and running some of the time. That sounded like a good idea, so Thursday we three shoveled snow for an hour or so and then went to the St. Croix Valley Recreation Center in Stillwater.
Part of the complex of buildings is an inflated dome enclosing two side-by-side soccer fields. We three call it the “Bubble.” It’s open to the public on weekdays for walking or running, from 6:00 am to 10:00 am, free on Wednesdays, $2.00 other days, $0.50 for seniors. It’s heated, but not much, perhaps 40-45 degrees or so. I was comfortable in shorts and two technical shirts, one of them long-sleeved. Gloves felt nice. There is no wind, of course :-)
The bubble has plenty of room to walk or run around the outside lines of the fields, almost exactly 1000 feet per loop, about 300 meters, 5.3 loops per mile. The diagonal is about 358 feet, or 109 meters, and the long sides are 285 feet, or 86 meters. Those are the longest straight-line sprints available, and the diagonal is not always available because of dividing nets between the soccer fields.
But the diagonals were available Thursday, and I ran them a half dozen times at full sprint, or nearly so, plus a few sprints on ta long side. Quads were still a little sore from Sunday’s races. In between I jogged at a pace of about 9:15 minutes/mile or so, for a total of 47 minutes, so probably about 5 miles. I need to read up on speed training, because I have no idea what I’m doing.
During the run we were amused by patches of snow sliding off the bubble. The roof was translucent enough that the previous night's 7-inch snowfall was visible as a dark area above us, and every now and then we would hear a swoosh sound, rising in pitch, and we would look up to see a dark patch accelerating off to the side and then toward the ground. Pity the person standing there. :-)
I was unusually tired Thursday after all that. Christmas eve, and we went to bed at the normal time but slept in Christmas morning. Nice. Feeling much better. Merry Christmas to all.
Christmassy breakfast. Oatmeal underneath. The red is pomegranate seeds:
7 comments:
Don's a good friend of mine (known him since 1979); I hold the record for most laps in the bubble: 301 (43 miles). I'll be there once the temps are -10 or so.
Don's pretty speedy - faster than I was when I was at my best.
Not to quibble, but 301 laps is 56 miles unless you were running short laps.
I did 20 miles in there once, and ended up with an achilles problem. Didn't know whether to attribute that to the turf or just to karma.
It was good that you got a run in with all that snow you had out there. My "running" has been limited to runs down streets to the nearest clearing in thre snow wall where I can step in momentarily to let cars go by, then take to the street again when the street is momentarily clear again of vehicles because the sidewalks are all snowpacked.
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Merry Christmas to you as well, Don. A Happy New Year, and all the best to you in 2010 and beyond!
Oops! The 301 laps was at Bielenberg in Woodbury. Mea culpa.
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