Last week, I kicked off the Coros Half Marathon Training Camp and this week the Fleet Feet Monterey Half Marathon Training program started where I am acting as a mentor to the 2:00:00-2:30:00 pace group. It was also Monterey Car Week, which meant it took twice as long to get any place and there were hundreds of millions of dollars of amazing cars scattered around town. 

After the 7-day schedule of last week, I stacked my strength on Thursday with a tempo run so I could take Monday off. This worked pretty well, but with the kickoff of the Fleet Feet program, I found myself pretty fatigued by the time my Sunday easy run rolled around. With the Santa Cruz Trail 10k race coming up next week, I decided to skip the easy run and just enjoyed a walk to the farmers market with my wife, which made up about 2.5 miles. Otherwise the week went pretty well — my training load was still about 100 points higher than what was scheduled, which I think is likely due to the types of hilly running I do near my house (an easy run was set for 70 tl and I ended up at 124 in a little less than the set distance).

I applied for and was picked to be a mentor for the training program this year, which feels like a good confirmation of my current health and stability. The group meets once a week for a track workout and then a long run on Saturdays. Fitting my own workout (strides) around the Wednesday program didn't work out as well as I had hoped, but the long run was great. I ran from my house to the store, led a 5 mile @ 10:45 average pace group, and then ran home which matched up perfectly. I'm looking forward to being with a group a bit below my current running pace and seeing how we benefit each other's fitness throughout the program. The Monterey Bay Half Marathon isn't until November, so we will have a good long training block together.

We entered a new strength block in my work with Coach Menachem Brodie of Human Vortex Training this week. Since April, we have largely been rebuilding all of the little muscles and movement connections post-abdominal reconstruction and we are just starting to dip into workouts that look more like a typical strength plan. This included more explosive goblet squats, testing kettlebell swing positions with the abdomen, and some kb presses, all of which felt pretty good.

I'm certainly asking more of my body and energy systems between the training and prepping/selling for the bakery, and having some tech work to do now that school is starting, so I wasn't too surprised to be pretty shot Sunday morning. It's going to take another week or two to find the right combination of workouts to make it all go together, but in the meantime I'm feeling pretty stoked to have had a couple of weeks where life's aperture is at a much wider opening than has been the case for the last 10+ years. My resiliency is up, the impact of my Crohn's disease in remission is down, and I'm looking ahead instead of only being able to process what's right in front of me. And on that note, I'll leave you with some of my favorite car spotting images from the week.