Mon: 4.5 miles (AM); 7 miles (PM)
Tue: 4.5 miles (AM); 11 miles (PM)
Wed: 9.5 miles
Thu: 4.5 miles (AM); 6.5 miles (PM)
Fri: 10.5 miles, including combo workout
Sat: 6.5 miles
Sun: 16.5 miles
Total: 81 miles
Thanks to several different weather incidents, this week’s training schedule got a little messed up, but in the end it turned out ok. I only got in one workout, but I made up for it by running some solid mileage. That left my legs a little on the tired and heavy side at times, but what harder running I did do still went pretty well. Hopefully spring is right around the corner, because I’m about as sick as I can be of the cold and especially the wind.
Anyway, normally I try to do a workout on Tuesdays, but with a cold rain coming down, I didn’t think it would be very productive, so I opted for a medium long run instead. Since I haven’t done one of those in a while, it was probably a good change and is something I need to remember to incorporate into my training from time to time. Thankfully we dodged the heavy snow that was forecasted for Tuesday night into Wednesday, although we did get a few inches at my house in comparison to almost none in Roanoke, but while we were lucky with the frozen precipitation, we weren’t so lucky with the wind that came behind it. Sometimes it seems like the wind has hardly stopped in the last two or three months, and Wednesday evening and particularly Thursday were just plain nasty. Both were days where you just had to run what you could and not worry about the details.
When Friday rolled around, I was hoping for no wind and warmer temps but didn’t really get either one. It was warmer and less windy than the previous few days, but that’s about all you could say. Since this was to be the only workout of the week, I made it a combo workout, which is something I like to do anyway. The workout consisted of 4X400m on the track followed by one times two miles on the road then finally back to the track to finish with 4X200. I’ve blown up on this workout more than once, but this time it was executed perfectly. The idea is to run the 400’s and 200’s at 5k pace or a little faster and hit the two miles in between around 10k pace. I cut the 400’s and 200’s down nicely, running splits of 78,77,76,75 on the 400’s and 38,37,36,34 on the 200’s, and ran the two miles nice and steady, hitting 11:10 with splits of 5:30 and 5:40. It was nothing to get excited about, but all considered, I’ll take it.
After an easy day on Saturday, I finished the week with the standard hilly long run in Fincastle. For various reasons, I figured this one might be a little slower than my long runs have been over the past few weeks, but it turned out to be my fastest yet. I was rolling pretty good right from the start, and I covered the last 13+ miles at a sub-6:30 average. I started to feel it a little towards the end and didn’t close overly hard as a result, but otherwise I felt strong, smooth, and under control the whole way. It was definitely a solid run and a sign that my strength is really coming around.
This week made six weeks since I started the project of remaking myself as a runner, and I might do a post in the next day or two regarding the progress I’ve made so far. Suffice it to say that I’m probably about as fit as I’ve been in the last two years, but unfortunately that’s not saying a whole lot. I’ve had my off days and gotten little discouraged here and there, but overall I’m headed in the right direction and enjoying the process for the most part. Hopefully by the second half of this year when I hit the Master’s category (gulp), I’ll be as fast as I’ve been in quite a while. Time will tell.
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