Sounds Off!

Alright guys and girls. This week I am asking you to give me a topic to write about. I have been thinking about doing this for some time now and I think now is as good of time as any. As I read over my last few posts, other than the one about us getting robbed, I'm realising they aren't the most interesting.

So please help me out. Sound off in the comments below. Ask my any questions you might have, suggests topics, anything at all.

I look forward to seeing what you all have to say.

Thanks in advance!

Terrible Teppanyaki.

Well, not too much to report from last week. We had a recovery week and so it was fairly uneventful. The week disappeared due to the lack of running, it was needed though. Over the last few days I feel like I'm back in Victoria more than being in Arizona. This has been the longest constant rain I have ever seen. Fortunately it stopped for the exact 2 hours we did our workout in this morning.

Really the only out of the ordinary thing that happened this week was that I had my first teppanyaki experience with Amy. For those of you who don't know what teppanyaki is, click here to find out. I had heard many great things about it and that it was usually a lot of fun, to be honest, I was quite disappointed. Our chef was terrible, trying to do tricks and failing, undercooking some food, overcooking other food. I have decided to erase that experience from my memory and go into my next teppanyaki as though I still had never been.

Usually I like to write about one week at a time and not really mix happenings from one into the next, but this could wait. Today we went to the hill to do surges were we got robbed last time. I'm thinking it might be time to find a new hill, today we saw a guy get arrested for who know what right along our half mile loop.

This is our last week of hard training before getting a little break for the holidays. It's hard to believe that in just over a week I'll be heading to Iowa for christmas. These first 2 months down here have just flown by!

Sorry for the mildly boring blog. I suppose thats the result of a mildly boring week.

WE GOT ROBBED!

Well, we got robbed mid workout this week. We were out doing 30mins of hill surges. The loop we do the surges is roughly 500m and with the different types of runners all at different levels of fitness this time of the year the 5 of us doing the workout were pretty evenly spread out over the 500m. About 10mins in we saw these two homeless people come near where we had dropped our clothes, one was a guy with a bike and the other a girl on foot. 15mins into the workout Matt kind of slowed down told us that he didn't see our shirts where they used to be, and the homeless couple was walking away. Andrew and I circled back to double check if our stuff was missing, and of course it was. I immediately turned around and run after our lovely homeless couple. I caught up pretty quick as they hadn't made it very far. I may have yelled a few profane words as I came closer to them, as soon as the guy turned and saw me he got on his bike a started to ride away. Since I was in the middle of a surge session I was nicely warmed up and it didn't take me long to catch up to him again. Long story short, Andrew joined me with our culprit soon after and he denied stealing our shirts for a long while until finally admitting to it. We were pretty sure he still had Andrew's keyless entry beeper for his car so we had to go through his entire bag. After searching everything and being careful to not disturb any of his "magical artifacts" we couldn't find it and it is still missing. We're pretty sure he probably had it in his pockets or something in hopes the car will be back one day.

Other than that it was a pretty good week of training. Hard, but good. We were in a volume week so there as lots and lots of running. Everything is going really smoothly so far this year. I've been able to hit the workouts hard each week, and staying injury free. I'm actually looking forward to hitting the track in January.

Outside of track things are great. I'm really enjoying having a girlfriend down here this year and knowing/meeting people outside of the training group. Amy and our friend Brian got out climbing the other week, first time I had gone in a LONG time. It was really good to be on the wall again. We're planning on going again this week since I'm in a recovery week and will probably have a little more energy than any other week. After my solid 14miler on Sunday Amy and I checked out the Tempe Festival of the Arts. It was really cool, they blocked off a good part of Tempe near ASU and had tents set up all over the place. It was actually a little overwhelming how many tents there were. We also checked out a really cool restaurant called Roaring Fork. It's really more of a BBQ place, but I had really been craving a good spinach salad. Turns our Roaring Fork happened to have one and I was able to fulfil my craving. Amy got some fried chicken that was also really good. I plan on going back sometime because I really want to try their Dr. Pepper Baby Back ribs.

As I said I'm in a recovery now, only goal this week is the make the body feel good. More time spent doing self treatment than running this week.