Track and Field Blogs - Lindsey Gallo

I guess I will start my first blog with a little "What I did on my summer vacation" recap. This was not a great summer for me on the running front. I had some injury problems at the end of the spring, and unfortunately I didn't run as well as I wanted to based on the kind of shape I was in. It was extremely disappointing, but I am hoping to use that disappointment to really motivate me this year. I did get to compete for the USA at the Pan Am Games in Brazil, though. I consider it a huge honor to represent my country, and my experience at the Pan Am Games was amazing (besides the 4+ minutes of my race...) Just being able to live in a multi-sport village, dealing with the logistics of transportation, training, etc was really great preparation for when I hopefully compete in the Olympics next summer. I was also really excited to be able to visit Rio, which has always been on my list of places to see.

After the Pan Am Games, it was back to the drawing board. I took a couple of weeks off to completely heal a hamstring injury that had been bugging me since USAs, and then began base work again. It's always weird to transition from the end of track season when I am usually having crazy fast speed workouts, to the long slow grinding workouts of the fall. Right now I am running about 60 miles a week. Workouts this time of year consist mostly of hills, tempo runs, and long fartleks. I am sure I will get more specific about these workouts in future blogs. I don't mind hills, but tempos and long runs are generally not my best workouts...so I am going to be trying to conquer those this fall!

We have a pretty great training group here in Ann Arbor. Anna Willard, Katie Erdman, and Morgan Uceny are the other pros, but two of my old college teammates Ana Gjesdal and Andrea Parker are also running post-collegiately and I do a lot of running with them as well. There are also some phenomenal runners on the Michigan team that I will interface with every once and awhile. I am used to being the only pro, but I think it is going to be great to have girls to train with who are on my schedule. Anna just started running again, but I am sure we will be doing some long workouts together soon, and she'll be dropping me on tempos in no time.

The best part about fall in Ann Arbor is football. We were off to a terrible start, but I think we are back on track now and I am looking forward to the rest of the football season and hopefully beating Ohio State. It would be nice to be able to tease Rob Myers all winter and spring about the victory!

Long run tomorrow morning (12 miles,) I better get some sleep!