Tue: 4.5 miles (AM); 8 miles (PM)
Wed: 10 miles, including combo workout
Thu: 7 miles
Fri: 4.5 miles (AM); 9.5 miles, including turnover work (PM)
Sat: 6 miles
Sun: 15.5 miles, including 20 min at marathon pace
Total: 72 miles
This was an ok week all considered. It certainly wasn’t optimal, mostly thanks to the weather, but this is the time of year where you sometimes have to compromise due to the conditions, and this was one of those weeks. It started out with something like 48 hours of cold rain then followed that up with some serious snow around 24 hours later. With that said, at least I didn’t miss a day even if I did have to change up my schedule a bit.
Tuesday was supposed to include some strides on the track, but to say that evening was miserable would be an understatement. I’ve had worse runs, but 38 degrees and pouring rain is about as bad as it gets. We were soaked before we hit the two-mile mark, and it just got worse from there, so doing anything other than just finishing out the run would have been pointless. The conditions on Wednesday were a little better, although still somewhat damp, and we were able to take advantage of that to get in a decent workout consisting of a fartlek of 4/3/4/3 min on with 2 min recovery followed by a mile at marathon pace. This was sort of an odd workout for me. The fartlek was a little slower than what I was hoping for but not too far off the goal in terms of the pace. However, it felt a lot faster and harder than it should have. The mile, on the other hand, wound up WAY under goal pace (5:53 as opposed to 6:05-6:10) and felt really easy. I took it as another sign that my body just isn’t accustomed to running fast right now and that’s what I’ll be going to work on soon.
I had to get out early on Thursday, which wasn’t much fun, not only because it was less than 12 hours removed from the workout the night before but also because it was cold and raining. It’s a good thing I did though, because there would have been no way I could have run that evening based on how hard it snowed and how bad the roads got. In fact, thanks to the road being blocked in multiple places due to accidents, it took me over 2.5 hours to make my usual 35 minute commute home. Friday was a little turnover workout consisting of six sets of 60 sec on/60 sec off/30 sec on with 60 seconds between sets. I felt a little sluggish for that one and we had to dodge a few icy spots here and there as well, but overall it went ok.
The week concluded with one of Andrew’s final marathon tune-up workouts on Sunday. We ran for just over an hour then did 20 min at marathon pace, after which I ran for another 23 min to finish out 15.5 miles. I spent a lot of time on my feet Saturday while working the first indoor meet of the season at VA Tech, and I don’t know if it was that or what, but I was tired and dead-legged for this one. The 20 min at marathon pace went ok, but it felt harder than it should have and the headwind we had to battle for the majority of it didn’t help. I managed to regroup after and closed the run out at a decent pace, however, so even though it wasn’t as easy as I would have liked, it was a pretty good workout.Even though it’s Tuesday as I type this, my plans for this week are still a little up in the air. Andrew will be doing his taper and be on reduced volume, so I may take this as a down week. That might be a good idea anyway in order to give me sort of a break before I switch gears with my training to a more speed-oriented approach that will start next week. At the same time, I had a bit of down week two weeks ago, so I’m somewhat hesitant to take another one at this point in time. Right now I plan on just playing it by ear, and most likely I’ll sort of have a hybrid week, not really a down week but not a full volume week either. The weather could play a factor as well, with single digit wind chills over the next couple days then a possibility of a wintry mix on Friday. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate winter?
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