I wasn’t going to post 2 days in a row – don’t want to set unreasonable expectations after all – but I figured I should keep this one timely. Also, I write on some variation of this theme 3-4 times a year, or rather, every time a new Rogue group starts.

Seeing as I was on vacation last week while the rest of my crew was kicking butt at the Lululemon SeaWheeze Half Marathon in Vancouver (the official goal race of our Spring/Summer group), today was my first quality workout with our “new” Fall group. Official target: the Austin Distance Challenge.

Most of my crowd follows a policy of “automatically sign up for Coach C’s next group”, so it’s always a tad weird to get a bunch of new people, new welcome emails, new drills, etc.

PS  – Speaking of new drills…Coach Chris, really? Backwards butt-kicks? That’s only going to end 1 of 2 ways:

It also pretty much never fails that one of these new groups will start immediately after everyone in the old group has gotten into a solid groove.

So yeah, I walked in this morning and recognized approximately 5 people from the old group…all 7-minute MGP types, of course. The other 15 or so people were complete strangers to me.

And they’re going to stay that way, until we can agree that we don’t ALL have to run our warm-up at 7:00/per mile!

I KNOW you are not allthat fast! (Okay, yeah, some of you probably are. And that’s cool. I’m not jealous or anything…)

Also, most of you are signed up for the Distance Challenge. We have 6 races to get through over 5 months people, including 2 half marathons, a 30K, and a full!!! That is PLENTY of time to exhaust ourselves.

So, this post started percolating to me as L – who thankfully showed up just as we were heading out – and I were sprinting through our warm-up at an 11:00 pace just to keep the group in sight. (Okay, that’s not a “sprint”, but I had 6×2 miles at MGP on my schedule, so 9 miles total with warm-up and cool-down. For a Wednesday morning.)

After finishing my workout 10 minutes after everyone else had headed back, I came up with this friendly PSA based on one of Coach C’s trademark sayings: