A Long Distance Accomplishment

It has been an exceptionally busy week for our family. After an injury and physiotherapy all last week, Noah's basketball team was in play-offs on the weekend for their division in the Metro Basketball Association. After three great games, the team won the championship game against the St. Margaret's Bay Slam by a score of 39-36. No easy task, the Slam were a strong team all year and our boys had not won against them during the regular season. But with a really tough defence and their offensive talents of outside shooting mixed with great rebounding and inside shots, the boys took the division championship.

Here they are, the Tri-County Tigers MBA Champs:

The win wasn't without disappointment. Both teams were given blue T-shirts to celebrate the tournament. No trophy, no medal, no banner. Nothing to mark the win for the boys. Which was disappointing for them because other divisions were given awesome trophies. So while I give kudos to the MBA for their great work in organizing such a great league for the season, they really need to get some consistency in what they are giving out to winning teams at the end of the season.

The boys are playing this weekend in the Bedford Classic, known as the largest minor basketball tournament in Canada. So far it has been great, and the boys are playing today and tomorrow at the Canada Games Centre so they are pretty excited about that opportunity!

Around the life of a basketball fan, I did a LONG run Sunday night, quite by accident. The dog showed up by my feet at 8:45pm holding his leash. I felt bad for him, no walk or run Sunday, so I got dressed and went out for a run. After I got started I realized it was 400's, which are timed intervals designed for you to push yourself a bit and see what times you can consistently get on that distance. I decided to give it my best effort, and ran my BUTT off for the first 400.

After what seemed like a very long time, I thought to myself, "You know, I MUST have run 400 meters by NOW." Checked my phone and realized, to my utter dismay, that I didn't have the GPS turned on so my phone had not registered that I had run any distance!

Another rule of thumb for my collection.
Don't set off on a timed distance run without GPS turned on.

At this point I had two choices. 1) the one I would usually be inclined to take: walk home and say to hell with it. And 2) turn on the GPS and start the intervals.

I'm not entirely sure why, maybe it was my sympathy for Boomer who clearly wanted to run, but I turned on the GPS and did the SIX intervals. Granted, at the time I decided to do them I thought there would only be FOUR intervals, but Jeff Galloway decided to trick me up and add two more to this weeks workout.

My goal for these intervals was to run the entirety of every 400m interval. Since I have been using Jeff Galloway's Run/Walk method, I haven't been pushing myself to run longer periods. So I thought I would give it a try for the interval training.

I was really excited by the end of the run. I had run all of the intervals (granted, it was slow running), and I made it home without sore shins or a sore lower back. These two areas have really bothered me since the mishap at the Fieldhouse Track, and I wasn't sure how they would hold up.

When I got home, I used Map My Run to figure out my distance (since I didn't have the GPS on the whole way). In the end, I went 6.5 km. I covered the 6.5 km in 1 hour, 1 minute and 33 seconds. Not a remarkably fast time, but don't forget this included my warm up walk, cool down walk, and a mid-run recovery walk since I wasn't used to running this far.

I was VERY excited by this! To complete this distance, run all of the intervals, and come out on the other side with no pain is a very exciting accomplishment!

Next up........let's talk about Magic with Jeff Galloway and it's place in training for distance runs.