Mon: 7.5 miles, including strides
Tue: 10.5 miles, including fartlek workout
Wed: 7 miles
Thu: 8.5 miles, including turnover work
Fri: 5.5 miles
Sat: 11 miles, including 5k race
Sun: 7 miles
Total: 57 miles
This was what I hope was a transition week between the lackluster training I’ve had over the past several weeks and what I hope is a good, solid block of training to come. The positives to it were that I got in three decent workouts, one of which was a race, and I logged 20 more miles than the week before. The negatives were that I failed to get in a long run, which I’m sort of de-emphasizing for the time being anyway, and I didn’t get in any doubles, which held my overall mileage total down. Also, I struggled most of the week with sore hamstrings, especially the left, which is odd because traditionally I’ve never had any trouble with my hamstrings. It’s not anything I’m worried about, just something odd to note. Overall, the week was a step in the right direction and I’m pleased with how things went.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve started running my recovery/easy days off heart rate, and that’s definitely led to a slowing of the pace. I’m now in the 7:20-7:35 range for these days as opposed to 7:00-7:15 before making the change, so a difference of roughly 20 seconds per mile. It’s too early to say how this experiment will turn out long term, but so far so good. As a tradeoff to this, I’m incorporating in some light strides towards the end of many of my easy runs and I’m also going to try to get consistent with doing drills several times a week. I did a pretty good job towards that end this past week, and I believe if I can keep it up long term, it will pay off. I’ve felt for some time that my stride length and my push-off power have been limited, and hopefully I can start to improve those things.
Moving on to the specifics of the week, Tuesday was a fartlek workout consisting of two sets of 4/3/2 min on with 2 min recovery followed by 4X100m on the track. With limited workouts over the past few weeks, it didn’t go that well, but I ran better than I expected to. Thursday was more or less a stride session where I got on the track and did 4X100, 6X200, and 4X100 with equal recoveries. I was planning on making the 200’s fairly light with a goal of starting at 40 and working down to 37. Instead I started at 36, held that for the first three, then dropped to 35’s for the last three. If I’d been pushing hard to do this, I’d say I blew the purpose of the workout, but considering they went fairly smoothly, I took it as a sign that maybe I haven’t lost all the turnover I worked so hard to build earlier this year.
Saturday I decided to head to a 5k race down in Bedford. I thought about racing the Dogwood 5k in Vinton, but I’m really not a fan of that course and happened to see this race as an alternative. It turned out I found a much more difficult course, but that was ok. It led to a good workout and I got the overall win as well, so no complaints. Recap to come.
I debated doing a long run Sunday morning, but I decided against it, and the way my hamstrings felt that was probably the right thing to do. I want to have another solid week this week, so I’m trying to think long term rather than short. Onward!
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