Double Duty Day

In the July issue of Runner's World, there was an article about the benefits of running twice a day. As long as you go 4 hours in between workouts (to refuel and let your muscles recover), your body can gain a lot from doing this. I did it a few times this summer, generally a 5 mile run in the morning and a 3 mile run in the afternoon, but not on a regular basis.
This morning I did my first track workout since mid-October. My friend Sarah put together a double cutaway track workout for me: 2000 meter (5 lap) cut-down run. You start at MP and then cut down 3 seconds per lap. I still need to figure out my splits with that, but I started too fast. Lesson learned. After that, 4x800 at about 10mile race pace and cut down 4-5 seconds each 800: 3:53, 3:49, 3:42, 3:37. All in all, it totaled to a 6.9 mile run. It felt great to get back on the track and do a workout like that. Also, the baseball team was out there doing stair workouts on the bleachers, so that was a good distraction while doing laps.

I then went to work, and a new friend of mine, Sean, asked me if I wanted to go for a run. We've started to run together a couple of times, and he has some routes that go through parts of DC that I've never ran through. So, we did about a 7 mile run as well at dusk. Perfect weather and running conditions, and a nice change of scenery (ran through Columbia Heights into Adams Morgan). The sun was just starting to set. This is one of the big positives about getting a guy friend for a running buddy - I can go running through the city in the dark. By the end of the day, I had ran about 14 miles. No wonder I was tired: ran 14 miles, worked all day, and wrote too. But both runs went well, and I think I'm going to try to do double duty once a week. Perhaps not this long as today, but I think I can gain a lot from it. At this point, I'll try whatever works in order to shave off minutes off of my marathon time!