Pillow Fight, Quidditch, and Awesome Run

I enjoy a good pillow fight as much as the next person, but I was not prepared for what awaited me on Saturday when I headed down to Union Square with six other members of the quidditch team. Feathers and fuzz swirled in the air; it was mayhem! Wielding pillows, we entered the fray to find a diverse pillow fighting crowd. Many people wore pajamas. Two guys even had on full body spandex suits, one green, one blue. And anyone wearing anything even slightly conspicuous dramatically increased the likelihood that they would be whacked. I'm definitely glad Jared convinced me to abandon my favorite post-quidditch locale, Toast, in order to broaden my horizons.

Practice was pretty decent, too. We warmed up by doing five repetitions of this massive hill in Riverside Park. For any of you Plano Boot Camp readers, I'm sure this workout would have been a walk in the park. Admittedly, my hillwork has been lacking in recent months, so I found it to be quite challenging. After the hill, we went straight into the usual out and back Dino Park run, which is slightly over a mile (thereby taking care of my streak requirement for the day). We then went straight into scrimmaging and did conditioning afterward. As usual, Jared had a fiendish circuit workout planned. He calls it Animal Crackers, though I know fearless boot camp leader T calls it Animal Kingdom. I'm including a diagram below. Please enjoy my super advanced Microsoft Paint skillz.

We did fifteen minutes of that. Most of it is fine for me, but the crabwalk KILLS me and it takes me forever to do it all the way down the field. OH, and we had to combat these things, which makes crabwalking and bear crawling quite painful if you're not careful:

Stupid spiky balls. To be fair, I was mostly able to avoid them.

So that was Saturday. Yesterday I did a 2ish mile run that was basically the Phoebe loop with a little distance added in. That was good, but today was even better. The NYRR are doing a free run series each Monday in April which consists of a short run and then a lecture or short class on a specific topic. today was stretching, but that wasn't the best part. The best part was that I, along with an older gentleman, led the fastest pack on the first half of the run! In my vibrams! DOUBLE WIN. The run was technically supposed to be 3 miles, but they didn't actually measure it out, they just said we'd go fifteen minutes running north and then turn around. Since we were running significantly faster than 10 minutes per mile, we probably ended up doing close to 4 miles in that thirty minutes and then a total of almost five with the warmup and cooldown segments. It was fantastic. I didn't keep up the same pace for the entire run, but we were definitely flying for the first half.



The stretching part was really good, too. I'm terrible about remembering to stretch and doing it properly and long enough, so I found it very helpful and informative. I'm also really looking forward to the next few Mondays!