This year I have added speed workouts to my training portfolio. As mentioned in my previous post, I'm juggling it with hill workouts on Thursdays. Unlike most of my other workouts, this requires some planning. I live near Parkville and work downtown in Kansas City. In between those two locations is the Park Hill South High School and a very nice track. So I will leave from my house, arrive at the track in the 5am hour. Once complete, I drive to work and shower at the YMCA that I use when I bike commute to work. Simple enough? Of the 5 planned track sessions, I have had issues with 4 of them.
1st
The first track session went great! Everything went as planned and I got to work with plenty of time to spare.
2nd
My second track session? It was a huge cluster. First it was storming on my way to the track. I waited about 5 - 10 minutes in the truck before starting while the rain let up. The session went quite well but it started raining again as I finished. I was soaked and ready for a shower. Drove to the YMCA and as I handed over my card to the receptionist. he said they had no water. I was completely dumbfounded. I found another YMCA about 20 blocks away but it was actually some children center and didn't appear to be open. I ended up driving up to the Vivion YMCA, which is another 20 minutes away. I ended up being over an hour late to work. Oops.
The bonus to this trip was I found the Vivion YMCA. It has a 50 meter lap pool that I can be used when start focusing on swimming again. Sweet!
3rd
Third times a charm? Not really. Overall this workout session went well from house to work. Fortunately, I have an awesome neighbor who is a co-worker. He texted me as I was leaving the track to inform me that our office didn't have water again, which likely meant the YMCA didn't either. I went directly to the Vivion center.
FYI... during the 7 days between the 2nd and 3rd session, the water department was ripping up the streets doing some sort of maintenance causing the outages before the work day started.
4th
A cold I had been fending off come on in full effect. Track session cancelled.
5th
Today was the fourth track session. As I've been recovering from the cold last week, I struggled a little to get up this morning and got to the track session about 15 minutes later than I wanted. During my first 800 I noticed a bunch of cars descending on the high school. As I was finishing up my second 800, about 20 members of the high school women's track team flowed onto the track and started their warm up. I was only halfway done with my planned session.
I am sure I had every right to finish and share the track(I do pay taxes in this school district), I really didn't want to become the pervy 34 year old dude who runs on the track with the women's track team. So I finished up my 400 meter recovery, hopped in the car and took off. Fortunately no shower issues downtown.
Bonus Story
The day that sent me driving around for an hour and half looking for a shower reminded me of my favorite pre-work adventure. I'm cheap about certain things and parking is one of them. I park on the street instead of paying $50 a month for a swanky parking garage slot. This one particular morning it was storming and raining like crazy. I was parked on the street, listening to the radio while waiting to make my break for the office.
The rain subsided a little and I took my chance. I opened the door, slammed it, and took off running. After about 3 steps I realized I wasn't the only thing running. The car keys were still in the car.... with the engine idling. Not a big deal except I had locked the car doors on the way out.
By the time I finally got in the office I was soaked. I had TKB bring me a change of pants and my spare keys. Fortunately, any would be car thieves decided to stay in due to the rain as well.
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