Training Summary: 6/22-28

Mon - 7 miles easy + weights after
Tue - 9.5 miles including 10X100m strides
Wed - 10.5 miles including fartlek of 6 X 3 min on/2 min off
Thu - 6 miles easy + weights after
Fri - 5 miles easy
Sat - 10.5 miles including 5k race
Sun - 15 miles
Total: 63.5 miles

Better late than never with this I guess. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the particulars because I’ve pretty much already recapped everything. The only thing of any significance I haven’t already blogged about is my Sunday run, which went pretty well. I did an out-and-back from the house with the plan of staying comfortable throughout but trying to run negative splits if possible. I hit 7 miles in 50:20 (7:11 pace) then got a little carried away and went 53:12 for the final 8 (6:39 pace), including a 6:19 14th mile. It felt good at the time, but might have been a bit much for the day after a race and probably left me in a hole more so than I would have liked (legs have been pretty dead so far this week).

Anyway, another good week of training in the books. That makes 8 weeks since I resumed running, with the last 6 of those being at least decent in terms of quality and quantity. I’m feeling good and definitely making progress, just not as fast as I would like. Gotta keep reminding myself that I haven’t had a significant stretch of healthy training in so long that I can’t remember the last one (probably sometime in 2007). Still, I get frustrated at times at feeling like I’m running hard yet not seeing that effort translate into the type of pace I think it should. More than a few times now I’ve questioned whether or not I’ll ever be able to get back where I used to be, much less better than that which is my ultimate goal. That’s when I have to keep it in perspective. Six weeks of training after more than a year and a half of inconsistency just isn’t enough to tell anything. Still, I honestly don’t know the answer to the question of whether or not I can ever get back to a point where I can challenge my PR’s, but I do know there’s only one way to find out and that’s to keep doing what I’m doing and see what happens. It won’t get easier, but it WILL get faster! The only question is how much.