Victory Mile, part II

Well, today was the hyped-up rerun of the one mile sprint. TJ of the "Tropic Blue" also ran his mile under eight minutes, so we were challenged to go head-to-head. Of course, that meant getting to Spiece half of an hour early ... I led about 95% of the way, but TJ wound up taking the crown with a final sprint. The official time was 7:29 for TJ to my 7:30. I'm a competitive person by nature, and its not a secret that I wanted to win. While I lost the head-to-head challenge, I still set a personal best. I would be a lot more disappointed if I hadn't given it my best shot. I'll run that sucker again in a few weeks and try to get my time down even further. My next goal is 7:12.

I also set another personal best today on the stepper. I remember the first time I completed 100 flights over two months ago. The machine fritzed out on me and I couldn't get a pic. It would have been about 36 minutes, and I was rightly proud of that accomplishment. I got it under 30 minutes on my next attempt and that's when it really started to dawn on me that the sensation of setting personal bests was addicting. It wasn't too long after that and I went 200 flights in less than 45 minutes, and eventually I got 300 flights in one hour. After pushing the distance envelope, I started pushing for speed and have since done 100 flights in 13:24 and 200 flights in 26:58. I know there a lot of numbers here and if you've not seen the machine, it may not mean much to you, but those are good numbers. Trust me.

The personal best I set today? 400 flights in 59:42. That was a response to Rick's challenge to do 200 this week. I wanted to push into new territory and leave my mark on this challenge. I felt like crap for the first 59:41, but the sense of accomplishment when I broke 400 was worth it. I'm going to repeat myself here, because it's worth emphasizing  ... setting a personal best is a great feeling. I got to have two big gulps from that cup today. Now the question is "what can I do tomorrow that I've never done before?"