I thought that maybe a blog to commend my summer training would be a cool start to my bloggage here on runnerspace..

It’s a neat accomplishment for me to say that I ran all summer, because for me that rarely happens... I’m a highly distracted person who usually finds something better to do each day and the idea of getting up early on a summer's day was always out of the question..

This summer changed me.. Changed my outlook on many aspects of my life and changed me from an "I'll be fine, I get in shape fast" type of runner to a "let’s see how wicked my base can be going back into the season" type of girl..

I should probably share a little about my summer experience just to give everyone a clue as to why Im proud of myself! Well, I took a camp counselor job at a girl's camp in West Virginia.. This camp (as you can probably tell from my photos) is called Camp rim rock, here we (75 counselors) were responsible for 290 campers, not to mention 60 horses! I was a sport and general counselor, leading kids around all day was my job and attempting to teach them new sports was definitely a joy, even though they were pretty difficult children.

The kids woke up at 7:30 which meant that if I wanted to get a run in, I had to wake up at least 6am. 6am was definitely doable, I'd done it all track season, but I needed a running buddy and Olivia was that girl, but her girls woke up at 7! Oh man, 5:30 was a hoot, it was dark most days, but we got the job done!

Olivia was a wonderful running buddy, she is from Melbourne Australia and is mainly a cyclist, but had done some training to be a miler/ half marathoner/ 10ker etc oh and she's a swimmer too.. Olivia is pretty much an exercise-aholic! She is an amazing athlete who doesn’t know it and as much as I tried to convince her, she wouldn't hear any of it! I was lucky to find such an awesome running buddy.. She actually came into my cabin most mornings and drug me from my cozy cardboard like mattress bunk bed.. Olivia was my constant reminder that I could do something special if I just gave myself the tools to do so. Olivia and I were really there for each other and put one another before ourselves.. It was pretty awesome.

So, off we went, 6 days a week, 5:30 in the morning! We combined our training experience to make a summer plan, which really consisted of us knowing that we wanted to run at least one 90 minute run by the end of the summer. So we knew that Sunday’s we'd run our long run (because we got up at 7am!) and after that.. Our planning time was 5:31am.. "how tired are you Liv"? "I great!" "Okay well.. I feel like a truck hit me"… 5miles it is! We had an out and back (fully cement) run we did most mornings.. Some mornings we ran it in 38 minutes, some mornings 45.. Although we had other routs we ran as well, these runs were made up on site, they were anywhere from 30-50 minutes, sometimes we put a little surge in, these “surges” were never planned, just placed in the middle of the run only if both of us were up for it.

As for hills, in the middle of the week we combined our efforts to make a crazy fun hill run! This is where we stayed on camp and ran around all the cabins and up in the woods, camp rim rock was pretty much on big hill! Being the competitive souls both are... the day following was Lactic acid city... which made teaching sports pretty difficult, but so worth it!

As for days off, camp gave us one day off a week, so that day was the day we didn’t run, although due to our extreme exhaustion we sometimes took more than one day off.. Our days at camp were pretty long, from 7:30am- 9pm we were working, stopping only for meals! So for Liv and me, 5:30am- 9pm was our day.. I was constantly exhausted!

Sleep was very important to me, as I was always working so hard everyday! The kids “lights out” time was 9:30 and I was usually never the one to enforce this because I was asleep before the babes every night! This early to bed attitude definitely got me a lot of flack from my fellow counselors who stayed up and chatted by the fire each night, but not only did the counselors tease me.. as soon as I fell asleep the kids would mess with me, I woke up numerous mornings with things written on me, my I Pod hidden, they even put booby traps up, knowing that it would be dark when I woke up.. Yeah, I fell smack on my face a few times over giant metal trunks in my delirious trek to find Olivia.. Those kids loved me!

Being dedicated to my running, my sleep and to my running partner all summer was such a great thing for me! I had a lot of confidence coming back into the season, I knew that if I could keep my consistency, I may have a chance at some PR’s..

Well, I didn’t get any PR’s out of my training, not because my training wasn’t good, but because I only raced once… I hope that I can keep my consistency up through the winter.. We’ll see what’s in store for Track!!