Mon: 4 miles AM); 7 miles (PM)
Tue: 9.5 miles, including turnover work on the track
Wed: 4 miles (AM); 9 miles (PM)
Thu: 6.5 miles (AM); 5 miles (PM)
Fri: 10 miles, including medium distance intervals
Sat: 6 miles
Sun: 16 miles
Total: 77 miles
This was a very solid week, giving me two good ones in a row since I refocused my training towards getting ready to run some good 5k’s and 10k’s this spring and summer. I’m actually pretty pleased with the way things have gone recently, and I feel like I’ve got things headed in a good direction. No miracles have occurred or anything like that, but I believe I’ve already noticed at least a little progress. If nothing else, I’m running harder than I have in a long time effort wise, and that’s bound to pay off eventually. I’ve had Jello legs several times over the past two weeks, and that’s something I haven’t experienced in a while. If I can stay on this type of training and also remain healthy, which everything is good in that respect right now (knock on wood), I believe I’ll get somewhere. It’s likely to take a while because I neglected what I really needed to be doing for so long, but if I’m patient and keep at it, I think the ability to run fast is still there. I hope so, at least.
Moving on to the specifics of the week, I hit the track again on Tuesday for my weekly turnover session. This week I did four sets of 400/300/200 with 200 recovery between everything. I won’t say it was easy, but everything was a little faster than last week, and whereas I struggled to finish the previous week, this week I closed it out well, running my fastest times for all three intervals in the final set.
After relatively easy days on Wed and Thu, I did some medium distance intervals on the roads on Friday. This week I went with 10/5/5 min on with 3 min recovery between. It was very windy Friday evening, and I didn’t seem to have my legs fully under me, but all considered, it went pretty well. I would have liked to have been a little faster, but at least I didn’t back down like I have in recent times when not feeling great or faced with less than optimal conditions. Instead, I gave it what I had and got some good work done, hitting paces just under/over 5:40 per mile.
I finished the week off with a very solid long run in the hills of Fincastle on Sunday. With the exception of the first mile, every mile was under 6:50, with the last two in 6:31 and 6:19, respectively. Considering it was a very cold morning and the course I ran had a total elevation change of over 1,800’, I felt pretty good about that. The best part, however, was how I felt. I was working at times, but for the most part, it was all nice and under control. That’s more along the lines of how my long runs used to go when I was doing my best running and racing.
This week will be more of the same as I continue to try to remake myself as a runner. Once thing I do need to do sometime very soon is to plot out a racing schedule for the next couple months. I’m not quite ready to toe the line just yet, but I’m getting there, and “ready” or not, I need to race sooner than later if for no other reason than to bust some rust and get a better idea of where I am in terms of my fitness. Race weeks also have the added benefit of giving a reason to have a down week, something I want to be very aware of regardless of everything else. Not scheduling any recovery weeks in the past has been my downfall more than once by either not letting my body absorb the hard work it was doing (burnout, in other words) or by causing an overuse injury, and I definitely want no part of either of those mistakes. I conclude with what I’m going to make my finishing statement for all my Training Summary posts just so it stays in the front of my mind: Nothing comes easy, so do what it takes!
No comments:
Post a Comment