Suicide Run Drills

This past Saturday, I decided to accept a friend's challenge to run suicide drills from his house to our old school, which is about 1.5km away. This was a bad idea.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, a "Suicide" is a drill used most often in basketball training. It's a pretty simple exercise that basically goes like this;
1) Line up at one end of the gym
2) Sprint to the the first line or a cone, turn around and sprint back to the beginning
3) Sprint to the second nearest line or cone, turn around and sprint back to the beginning
4) Continue until the farthest line, then build back down.

In a gym setting, this is a pretty tiring exercise because the athletes are going at a really high intensity the whole time. The challenge that I accepted was to do a Suicide, using city blocks as my markers. I originally had it in my head that I could do it in a half hour. Obviously I had not done the math, because it turns out that this 1.5Km stretch becomes closer to 15 when you are running it Suicide-style.

I did the run at night, because there are less cars on the road ( I live in a pretty quiet neighbourhood), and I wanted to run on the street since the sidewalks were pretty icy. Oh ya, it was also somewhere around -20celsius while doing this. It was so cold that the display on my Timex Global Trainer stopped working.

The drill is called a Suicide because it is extremely intense. On the road, it is pure torture. I had to run the same path over and over and see the same scenery, the same parked cars, so many times that I still see them in my dreams. My pace wasn't spectacular, which is pretty expected considering all the stop-and-going that I had to do. Also, I was for some reason unable to connect to GPS so I'm basing pace on my footpod, which I find to be a little off. However, I think I ran around 13KM in about 1:20, which come up just under a 10min/mile. Not fast but I'm satisfied.

Oh, in other news, I am officially registered for the Lake Placid Half Marathon ( see countdown on the right). I didn't realise that it happens to be the same weekend or right after my local Spartan Races, so I don't think I'll get a chance to try those out this year, but a Half in a  beautiful new location works for me! Hopefully I'll get to PR with all the training I'm doing now :) .

The next week should be interesting, as we are starting to ramp up the duration of our training sessions.
That all for now, keep Tri-ing!

PS. Shout-out to Tamara! (she definitely didn't ask to be mentioned)