Mon: 8 miles
Tue: 8.5 miles
Wed: 9 miles, including hill repeats
Thu: 8 miles
Fri: 6 miles
Sat: 11.5 miles, including 5k race
Sun: 9 miles
Total: 60 miles
This wasn’t a bad week I guess, but it could have and should have been better, and the bottom line is, if I want to accomplish the goals I have for myself, I NEED my weeks to be better going forward. Don’t get me wrong, sixty miles isn’t bad volume, and I got in some decent quality as well, running strides on a couple days, a hill workout one day, and a race on the weekend, but in order to get where I want to be, I’ve got to suck it up and train better. I’m not talking about running myself into the ground and getting hurt, but suffice it to say that I have plenty of evidence that doing what I’ve been doing over the past several months just isn’t cutting it. That said, I’m going to make a serious effort to get back on it starting this coming week. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold myself to that.
Moving on to the week that was, I will cut myself some slack in that when the week started I was still recovering from the trip to San Diego and a subsequent very busy weekend. It was about mid-week before I felt somewhat back to normal, and even then I wasn’t exactly bursting with energy, so Wednesday’s workout was designed to wake my legs up a bit while not being overly taxing. Accordingly, I did eight hill repeats of around 200 meters in length with jog down recovery. The result was a good workout and confirmation that I need to make hills a more consistent part of my routine.
The next couple of days were relatively easy, followed by the Pilgrim Baptist Church 5k on Saturday. The course for this race was mostly on the greenway out to Best Buy and back, meaning the first half was predominantly uphill with a significant climb right in the middle followed by a mostly downhill second half. As a result, I ran my fastest mile in the last mile and wound up taking the win in 18:35. Now while that’s slow, it’s not as slow as you might think, since the course was a little over 3.25 miles and also not exactly what you would call easy. Still, it tells me the last few weeks of poor training have not been kind to me and that I have A LOT of work to do. I skipped doing a long run on Sunday with plans of doubling instead, but then I got lazy and couldn’t force myself out the door for a second run so that was that.
This week I hope to get started on some more serious training and see if I can’t start making some progress towards getting where I want to be. I could throw out plenty of reasons/excuses why I haven’t done better over the last several months, some of which could certainly be considered legitimate, but it all boils down to this: if I want to run fast I must do the things it takes to do so. If I can’t do those things while also fulfilling my more important obligations, then I’m facing a hard decision that I really don’t want to make, so here’s hoping I can figure it all out quickly.
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