Mon: 6 miles
Tue: 4 miles (AM); 7.5 miles (PM), including strides
Wed: 11.5 miles, including 7 mile progression run
Thu: 6 miles
Fri: 4 miles (AM); 9 miles (PM), including light fartlek
Sat: 5 miles
Sun: 16 miles, including 25 min at marathon pace effort
Total: 69 miles
With just one catch, this was a pretty good first week back to real training. The catch is as follows: the workouts showed me that I’m farther behind than I would like to be when it comes to running faster paces. Since I did a decent amount of running and even a couple workouts during my downtime, I had hoped I wouldn’t lose that much, but I think I lost more than expected. That just seems to be the theme nowadays and I guess it’s probably a part of getting older. The good news is I noticed some progress even over just last week, so hopefully things will come back fairly quickly.
The strides I did on Tuesday were the first indication of my current lack of speed. I did four laps of ins-and-outs on the track, so 8X100m, and they felt FAST. Having them feel fast would have been fine if they had actually been fast, but my split for the mile told me they were anything but. The next day’s workout actually went pretty well. After a 3 mile w-up, the goal was to start with a mile at 6:50 pace then get 10 sec per mile faster through 6 miles. I was actually ahead of pace all the way to the end and even felt good enough to add a seventh mile. That extra mile was probably a touch too much though because I fell off the pace ever so slightly (6:01 for mile 6 vs. 6:05 for mile 7) then really felt it in my legs in the cooldown.
Friday’s workout was a light fartlek with a couple goals in mind, first to shake the junk out of my legs and second to bridge the gap between the two harder workouts of the week on Wednesday and Sunday. The workout was simply 2X30 sec, 2X60 sec, 2X2 min, 2X60 sec, and 2X30 sec, all with equal recoveries. I didn’t really try to get after it, but rather just strided out at what felt like the proper effort for the day.
Sunday was the big effort of the week, so Andrew and I headed to the train bed in Oriskany, which is a great place for this type of workout. He was supposed to do an hour followed by 25 min at marathon pace, 5 min recovery, 20 min at marathon pace, and finally a 10 min c-down. I knew that was more than I could handle, but I was hoping to last through the 25 min push and maybe 5-10 min of the second one. The first hour of running was all gradually uphill, and it never felt that comfortable. As soon as we started the faster running, I pretty much knew it wasn’t going to happen. I actually held together better than I thought I might for the first three miles (6:09, 6:07, 6:06), but I faded a bit in the 4th mile and finished with a 6:10 avg for the 25 min. At that point I knew attempting another push would be useless, so I just finished out 16 miles and called it a day. Overall it was a pretty solid run for where I am at the moment. I just didn’t have enough of that type of work in me to do any more than what I did.
This week will be a bit different because we’re doing our long run on Sat instead of Sun. That likely means just one true workout for the week, which probably isn’t a bad thing at this point since this past week was pretty intense considering I hadn’t done hardly any workouts in the past 5-6 weeks. It’s all a bit of a struggle right now, but I have a feeling that I’ll be a completely different runner two to three weeks from now. Hope so at least! Merry week before Christmas and happy running, all!
No comments:
Post a Comment