Training Summary: 1/21 - 1/27

Mon: 7 miles (AM); 4 miles (PM)
Tue: 7 miles, including strides
Wed: 9 miles, including 4-mile progression
Thu: 7 miles
Fri: 8.5 miles (moderate run)
Sat: 6.5 miles
Sun: 15 miles, including 2X10 min at MP
Total: 64 miles

When I was writing out my training schedule for this month, this was originally planned as a down week coming of three weeks of building. However, the middle week of that three week build got thrown off due to me being sick, so I considered postponing my down week for another week or two. That’s something that’s gotten me in trouble in the past, however, so between knowing that and the way the weather turned out, I wound up sticking to the plan of a down week. While it wasn’t super-light in terms of volume and intensity, it was light enough and gives me a good break between starting to prepare for the spring racing season this coming week and what has in reality been a long block of marathon training (more to come on that in a subsequent post sometime soon).

Anyway, there’s not a whole lot to recap this week. The first half of the week was spent doing Andrew’s taper with him. We ran 8X100m strides on Tuesday, with me adding a couple miles on top of what he did. We followed that up with a 4 mile progression on Wednesday where we started about 30 sec slower than marathon pace (MP) then progressed to 15 sec slower than MP for the second mile, exactly MP for the third, and finally 15 sec faster than MP for the last.

The end of the week was a little odd for a couple reasons. First, I had to squeeze in what I could on Friday morning thanks to the snow we got that afternoon. As a result, I couldn’t really do any sort of a workout, but I did attempt to make the most of what time I had by doing what I call a moderate run. I’ve had good success with these in the past, and they’re basically done at an effort that’s just a hair faster than the pace at which you could talk. In other words, they’re not as fast as tempo pace, but you’re definitely leaning on it effort-wise and doing so for an extended period of time. It was 17 degrees that morning, so it was hard to get going and stay on it, but I managed a decent run.

Sunday I agreed to help Allie with a beast of a workout she had planned. After a 2-mile warm-up, we did 2X10 min at her tempo effort (6:22 avg for the first and 6:03 avg for the second) with 2 min recovery. Her plan was to then run 8-9 miles after the second push before doing more pushes and a cooldown. I had no desire to run that long, so after the first set of pushes concluded around the 6 mile mark, I just ran the rest of the way. Miles 7-10 were on the slow side for me, so after that I got moving again and averaged 6:48 for the last 5 miles, hitting the last mile in the 6:30’s. It was a bit of a strange way to do a long run, but overall it worked out pretty well and I think I got in some decent work as a result.

This week starts what will hopefully be a new chapter in my running career. I’m certainly not counting on doing anything special, but it’s past time for me to change things up and see what I can do. I’m classifying this as Project “Need for Speed.” As I mentioned earlier, more to come on that in another post in the next day or two. Happy running, all!