Lots to say (300m workout, Yosemite etc)

A friend asked me on Wednesday whether I want to go to Yosemite park with them on Thursday. I had a lot of schoolwork to do but whatever, it can wait. (OK, it cannot, but the one and only advantage of doing problem sets in groups is free-riding. Well, that's what I did this weekend. Which means I did nothing.)

But weekend was awesome. But let's start with my Thursday workout.

I was told that I might enjoy this workout. Well, I did not.
3 x 5 x 300 with 100m jog between intervals and 500m jog between sets.

First set was horrible. Hard. I was struggling with pace and my running form was horrible because I was trying too hard. And break between these was only freaking 45-50seconds, that's like nothing. I did 61, 65, 63, 62, 62.
Second set was better. I stopped concentrating on trying to hit the pace but tried to concentrate on form. I told to myself, just keep a nice form and you will hit the pace. It worked: 61, 62, 61, 61, 61
Third set: I started my 11th interval and I could hear lactic acid to flood my legs after at 200m mark. But surprisingly this set felt the easiest and it went by very fast. This time I did not try too hard to hit the pace or to concentrate on form. I know that I can pull off a fast 200m but blasting a fast 300m is a different story. If you are not trained you "die" after 200m. My tactics was to just ran as fast as I could for 200m aerobically and then used the pure muscle power to get me through last 100m. And it went pretty smoothly. But I wanted to be done. I wanted to sprint the 100m rest to get it over with. But of course I did not:) I did: 60, 61, 60, 60, 60

I am pretty satisfied with the results, I was sore and ate two servings of protein powder.
Speed work sucks. Ok, it does not suck, it is me who sucks at it. I know I need to do it.
I will do this workout again in couple weeks to see whether I am improving.

We left for the Yosemite at around 7:30pm. Because I and one other person had class till 7 (I did not have time to go to store because I had to run and then classes so I let one of the guys to buy my food. He got us 10 cans of RedBull and 10 bottles of Vitamin water...I nicely explained to him that those are not real drinks.).
Yosemite is little over 300miles from LA so we were hoping to get there around 1am. No such luck. There was a road construction and it cost us way over 1hour. I usually go to sleep around 9:30-10pm so you can imagine me driving till 3am (and after that 300m workout)....But I managed and nobody died.

Friday:
Slept until 7am...I am a light sleeper so when people around us started to move they woke me up. 4 hours of sleep!
We went for a short 7 mile hike (3.5 up, 3.5 down), I let the others in a dust after few minutes but always had to wait for them every couple minutes because one person did not have backpack and I was carrying his water...But finally we got to the destination- Upper Yosemite Fall. Very nice! It was 2pm. From there it was 2.9 miles to Eagle peak and 4.9miles to El Capitain. I calculated that I can still make it to Eagle peak and get back to camp before it gets dark at 6:30pm. So I left the others to their misery and took of. I had hill workout planed for Saturday but I figured I should take advantage of this hike. I did not do intervals as I was supposed to, but I just run uphill continuously (when it was not too technical or too steep) I got to Eagle peak in less than 30min so decided to continue running/walking to El Capitain. It was little scary because it was late already so I have not met anyone. It was only me and bears. That's also one reason why I did run. I made it to El Capitain, took pictures (might post some later) and run/walk back to Yosemite Fall and walked the technical downhill back to camp.
It was a very good workout. Legs were definitely trashed afterwards. But I was nicely surprised that I managed to run those uphills. I went to store and got some protein bars and strawberry milk, I think that it helped me a lot to recover.
I got to the camp at exactly 6:30pm and it was pitch dark 10min later. Perfect timing.
Everybody was tired so they did not have energy to stay out late and drink so I could go to bed at around 10:30pm. I got full 8 hours of sleep!

Saturday:
One reason why I do not like trips with people is that people do not think and most people are less trained than I am.
I and one guy wanted to do Half Dome hike. In a guide it says that it takes anywhere between 10-12 hours. And you cannot start at 10am if you want to do 10 hours long hike and it gets dark at 6:30pm, right? I managed to persuade him that we need to leave at 8am. He however wanted to get free coffee that was given out at 8am, but have promised me that we will leave between 8 and 9. I eventually managed to wake him up at 8:20 and we left at 9:30...I hate people.
Hike was very very nice (and much easier without running). I promised the guy I will stick with him and I did although it was not easy. The other problem (apart from the fact that I had to carry his food and drinks because he did not have a backpack so we had only mine and if I had given it to him to carry it he would have been even slower) was that he drank all his water in first 1/4 of the way and then of course I had to give him half of my water. Have I already mentioned that people are stupid?
Anyway, I was trying to be pleasant and not to loose my temper.

Apart from those few issue, I really enjoyed the weekend! I love hiking. I am very glad they asked me to come.

Unfortunately we had to go home on Saturday and not Sunday as we planned. We got home at around 1:30am and I went to bed at 2am. This weekend was a mess sleep-wise for me.

Sunday:
Since car was rented and paid for we decided to do a small trip to Long Beach. I had to get up at 7am (only 5 hours of sleep:() to do an easy 6 miler before we left.
I was drizzling so I was glad we did not stay in Yosemite because it would have been a waste.
Sky has cleared up a bit so Long Beach trip was ok.

I am really tired. I need to do some school work still but I think I will go to bed soon although it is only 7pm.