Great Weekend of Running!

Happy Monday MSRC! I just finished watching the Boston Marathon and it was really exciting!  Kara Goucher and Ryan Hall both took third which is awesome!  The best part is they are both young and will be back for many more NYC and Boston marathons!  I pray one of them chooses to run Chicago some year, my home town.  If one of them does, I hate to do this but I will miss the Twin Cities Marathon that year to cheer them on in Chicago!

Remember Thursday night and my rant about stronger hips, glutes, and core muscles?  I hope you heard me and are trying to fit in some exercises for each region at least 2x/week.  Here is a beauty of a picture, you all doing the plank with beautiful WBL in the background.

Another 30 seconds!! Hold it!! Breathe ladies, breathe!

Saturday was such a beautiful day!  I was not at the Gateway due to a race (next paragraph) but I have heard it was a great training session!  Thank you Laura for leading and thank you Tracy for bringing the treats and water!  Congratulations to Serena and Bonnie for their first ever 12 miler in preparation for the  Maple Grove Half Marathon.  Anyone else have a breakthrough run?  I can’t blog about it unless I know about it so please share with me/us!  Thank you to all who showed up on Saturday, hope you liked the trail!  Wait until the leaves are full strength and the grass is green, so beautiful out on that trail!

Saturday I was at the Trail Mix race in Bloomington at Hyland Park Preserve.  There were 8 of us:  Robin, Stella, Carrie, Dawn, Sarah, Kristin, Ruth, and Me.  The Trail Mix consists of 3 separate races:  a 50K (31.07 miles) ultra run, 25K (15.53 miles) run, and 50K 4 person team relay.  We all did the 50K Relay.  Robin, Stella, Carrie, and Dawn made up the Fab 4 team partly because they are fabulous and partly because they are all 40 or 40+ and that makes them mature!  Sarah, Kristin, Ruth, and I were not real creative, our name was, guess, Moving Soles!  The course is a 7.75 mile loop course all on wide grass trails, single track trails, and woodchips.  It is rather hilly too, quite tiring!  The 50K individuals had to run the same loop course 4 times!  I can not imagine!  The real kicker was the ski hill.  Not sure if you all know this but Hyland is known in the summer for their great ski hill training sessions for runners.  Tuesday nights are big hill repeat nights on those hills.  They announced that we would be running the ski hill this year (last year they had to take it out because of bad weather).  I was wondering if that meant up it or down it.  I was thinking up but I was wrong!  They made us run down it and wow was that tough on the knees!  I can not image the 50K runners, 4 times running down that hill, whew!  They must be so sore! 

The relay is fun as we all get to run together and they tally up our times for the overall team time.  The top 2 teams in each category win the awards!  I am so proud to announce that Fab 4 got 2nd place and Moving Soles got 5th place out of 14 women only teams!  Way to go!

Trail Mix 2009, after the race!

This is so funny!  They awarded the best name for a team this year and I am sorry to swear but there was a tie for winners; 3 Bitches and a Kickstand (co-ed team and we assume the man was the kickstand) and No Nuts (which was an all women’s team)!  Aren’t those way too funny?

I also want to congratulate Roxanne Erickson in her 1:58 finish at the Earth Day Half on Saturday in St. Cloud.  Roxanne is like an honorary member of MSRC.  She moved to Willmar for her job a while back but keeps in touch with the group.  Way to go Roxanne!

All in all, what a great weekend of running for everyone it sounds like!