And here come ... the HILLS

OK, OK, I knew this was gonna come. In basically any training plan you can find there are always tempo runs, speed work, long and slow runs and of course some hill repeats. When I met at 6:30 am with The Coach today, it was still quite dark before dawn and still raining a bit. (Honestly, my first thought when I woke up was: why the hell do I want to run the marathon??? I want to sleep right now and not go out running in the crazy rain, but then ... the race is in less than two months and I knew The Coach was gonna be there). Arriving to the meeting point, I had already almost 2 miles (3 km) under my belt, since I am carless for few weeks and had to get there somehow.

The Coach was pretty happy with my performance at the Reebok Women's Run Wien (race recap coming later today). But it seemed little too good to be true when he announced that we were only doing 4x 500 m repeats, damn fast (2:05 each = 4:10 min/km = 6:42 min/mile) but only four of them. Yep, too good to be true. I even squeezed myself to do the last 500 m at 1:59 min (3:58 min/km = 6:23 min/mile). And there we went to the lower part of the park. "Can you see those steps, and this steep hill here?" ... "Yep, Coach?" ... "Only four times and you are done." Yes, I was done.  I am glad for my mindset that The Coach knows what he is doing and I just go and follow his orders (unless he seems totally unreasonable). Four time up the stairs plus hill and you are done ment, you are done with running and ready for some strength training.

That was just a quick note to share the marathon training news :) Women's Run Wien photos and race recap coming later today! And please, please help me help the kids, check out my fundraising page. It's official, I am running NYC marathon 2011 to support the Team Hole in the Wall!