Mon: AM - 4 miles; PM - 8 miles, including hill bursts
Tue: AM - 4.5 miles; PM - 9 miles, including strides
Wed: 10.5 miles, including tempo run
Thu: AM - 4.5 miles; PM - 8 miles
Fri: AM - 4.5 miles; PM - 9 miles, including drills and stride workout
Sat: 7 miles
Sun: 15 miles with 6X30 sec towards the end
Total: 84 miles
This was a very solid week. I feel like I covered most all my bases, and if I can knock out enough of these sorts of weeks, I think it will eventually pay off. The key will be not overdoing it to the point where I either get injured or I get tired and dead-legged such that I can’t put forth good quality efforts on workout days. It’s a fine line to walk, and admittedly I’ve done a poor job of straddling that line in the past, so the key will be to learn from my mistakes and see if I can’t make it work this go ‘round.
The first couple days of the week were doubles with a little something added towards the end of both afternoon runs. I really feel like a big limiting factor for me over the past several years has been power and length in my stride. Accordingly, that’s one thing I really want to work on going forward, and hill bursts, drills, and strides are all methods of doing so. I also feel like I need to work on my ankle strength and flexibility to aid in the push-off phase, and the various forms of ancillary work I’m starting to do will help with that as well.
Wednesday was basically the first workout in Andrew’s build towards the Chicago Marathon, and it was sort of a broken up tempo run where we would run a mile at marathon pace followed by a mile float and then repeat. I ran the miles a little faster than marathon pace, going in the 5:40’s, and hit the floats around 6:30. The end result was 5 miles covered in 30:50 and a pretty solid day overall.
After an easy day on Thursday, Friday was geared towards working on basic speed and consisted of a warm-up followed by drills then a stride workout. It went ok and I think I got some benefit from it, but I definitely didn’t have my legs under me that day. When I got home, I realized I had run 88 miles in the past 7 days, which explained the way I was feeling. As a result, I took Saturday extremely easy, with a pace well north of 7:30 per mile. I felt much better on Sunday, although I was still experiencing the adjustment to the surge in mileage. I also had a stretch of around 8 weeks where I really didn’t do much in terms of long runs, meaning anything over 75 minutes starts to drag on. Regardless, I got through it fairly well and even threw in 6X30 second strides towards the end. The first of those felt pretty rough, but it actually got me going and they got faster and easier from there. All this was done on the Jackson River Trail in Covington, VA, which is a great place to run (shaded, mostly flat, and a soft surface).
My plan right now is a couple more weeks similar to the past two then a down week. One of the mistakes I’ve made in the past is just building, building, building without ever taking a break to allow my body to recover and absorb the work. That’s one of the things I can’t repeat in the future, especially now that I’m an “older” runner. Training is always an experiment, which is one of the things that makes it fun. I just hope to avoid the explosions that I’ve had in the lab in the past – ha, ha. Run Happy; Run Fast!
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