Hardest workout of the year: But I'm still standing

The quality workouts at Team Rogue are coming fast and furious now. During every run, coach is making us do all or part of it in some kind of tempo-hill-interval-blow-out-your-lungs type of pace.

Thursday morning was a 12.7 mile run that included a warm up, then 5 miles where we had to run hard for two minutes, then easy for two minutes. Then repeat until we were done with the five miles. Then we had water, a one-mile cool down, then we had to run between our tempo and half marathon pace for 3.5 miles before ending the run with another 1-mile cool down.

The hardest part of the run for me was the 5-mile portion, where we were on and off for 2 minutes at a time. No stopping. No water. I've run 5 miles a thousand times in my life, but this was probably the hardest 5-mile workout I've run, at least for this season. It's a good thing that one of the guys I was running with, Jon A., had programmed his Garmin to beep every two minutes. We'd take off for two minutes hard and just as your lungs and legs began to revolt, Jon's watch would beep and you knew it was time to recover for two minutes.

It seemed like it took forever to run that 5-mile part. And the last 1.5 miles was just brutal. We were running up a street named Balcones and some of those stretches had us running the hard part where we climbed 50 feet or more in two minutes. I have to admit, sometimes I wanted to extend the 2-minute rest time another 30 seconds or so. I mean, who would know if we were on the hard or easy part, right? But, no... Jon kept us honest. He'd countdown near the end of the recovery period and yell, "Let's go..." ... But, he was also very good about yelling, "Easy, easy," when it was time to stop running hard.

We wound up doing 10x2 minutes hard with a two-minute recovery jog. Most of my min/mile paces on the hard running were between 6:45 and 7:15, though they hit the high 7s and low 8s on a few of the intervals that were steep inclines. The good thing is that I had exactly the same pace (6:47) on the first and the last 2-minute interval.

I was happy to be done with that, and odd as this may sound, the 3.5-mile tempo run that followed seemed easier. I hit 7:20 on each of the first two miles of the tempo run, 7:05 on Mile 3, and 6:59 pace for the last half mile, most of which was down hill.

We have another crazy workout Saturday: 2 mile warm up, 3 miles marathon pace, 1/2 mile cool down, 3 miles half-marathon pace, 1/2 mile cool down. We will then repeat the marathon/cool-down/half-marathon bit until we get to Mile 19, then we do a 2 to 4 mile cool down.

The dog days of summer are definitely here for marathon training. And it's a good thing I have not been bitten... yet.