The workout partner juggling act

I’m trying to pack two hard, long workouts (one of which has 16 miles at MP or faster… yikes) in before we fly out for vacation Friday morning.  It’s crazy – trying to get tied up in work, last minute planning things, etc.

Each workout is long enough and hard enough (and will be done on tired legs) that I know I need someone or something – anything – to help me through it.

Luckily, Brenden is up for anything.  Since I’m already down in Faribault for a dentist appointment on Tuesday, I can easily swing down to St. Peter and knock out the first hard workout (8×1 mile at tempo, 30 secs rest).  I can work in the morning until appointment, head down for the run, and then work until late in the evening after the workout.  Works out great.

For the second hard workout, I was racking my brain — I could do it Thursday or Friday.  20 miles total: 8@MP, 1@tempo, 4@MP, 1@T, 2@MP.  That’s a leg burner if I ever saw one.  Let me think.  Could I put 20 miles in on Thursday, between the commute to/from work, a full day’s work, and getting up to Shoreview by 8:00-8:30pm?  Could I do it Friday before our flight at 7am?  I can’t exactly do the 20 miles over lunch on Thursday (ha)… but potentially could leave work a little early… if I could just find someone (but honestly, who wants to do a workout like this, and who could start at 3 or 4 in the afternoon?)…  I sent a note out to Tom at the shop to even see if he or anyone he knew would be up for a portion of the workout, or would be so gracious as to accompany me on a bike (seriously, anyone) .

Craig responded that he might be open to skipping out of work early, but has a 50k race this weekend.  To think he’d be willing to do something the week of a race to help me out is beyond awesome – I’d feel terrible, though, since he has the potential to have a knock-out race.  Luckily, there’s a really good triathlete at work that was looking to do an hour sustained effort on Thursday, which lines up decently well with the first 8 miles of MP of one of the workouts.  We threw around times: 6am?  I told him I would be groggy, but I could totally wake up at 4:30 to get there in time. Could we start at 5pm?  He has meetings all day… probably wouldn’t work.  We finally found a block of time in the mid-afternoon, I find it awesome that we set up a meeting notice to block off the time :).

Wow.  That took a lot of effort.  Not nearly as much effort as it’ll take to get through these workouts and this week, though! 🙂