Training Summary: 6/24 - 6/30

Mon: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 8 miles
Tue: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 9 miles, including hill bursts
Wed: 11 miles, including tempo work
Thu: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 8 miles
Fri: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 9 miles, including drills, strides, & hills
Sat: 7 miles
Sun: 16 miles
Total: 86 miles

It pains me a bit to write this, but this was my last week of training as a 30-something. At least I finished out the decade with a good one! This was my highest mileage week of the year so far, and when combined with last week, gives me a two-week total of 170 miles. Not too shabby for an old man – ha, ha. Of course the important thing is whether or not it’s working in terms of improving my fitness, and whether or not I can sustain this sort of training long term, and so far so good. I seem to be holding up very well, and I also believe I’m starting to see some signs of improvement. However, I knew when I started this surge that it would probably take two or three segments of 3-4 weeks on followed by a down week before I would see results, meaning 10-12 weeks total, and I still believe that to be the case. In the meantime, I’m likely to see more harm than good due to tired, heavy legs while I make the adjustment. Having done this many times before, I know the routine.

Moving on to the details of the week, Monday and Tuesday consisted of logging the miles with some hill bursts at the end of the run on Tuesday. Wednesday was essentially a broken up 30 minute tempo run in which Andrew and I ran five sets of 3 minutes on with a 3 minute float. The “on” portions averaged 5:40 pace and the floats averaged 6:25. Overall we covered right at 5 miles in the 30 minutes total, which was a pretty solid effort considering the humidity that afternoon. Thursday was a standard recovery day, and Friday consisted of some turnover and form work in which we did a long warm-up followed by drills then ran some strides followed by some 30 second hills followed by more strides. The week concluded with the always tough Lee’s Gap loop as a long run on Sunday.

I have one more week up before taking a down week next week in which I’ll drop my mileage back to 65-70 miles. I’m viewing this as a base phase, but not a base phase in which all I do is run a bunch of long slow distance. It’s hard to hammer out fast intervals this time of year as the heat and humidity just aren’t conducive to that type of work. That being the case, I’m going to work on strength through mileage, aerobic capacity through tempo type workouts, and my stride length/power through drills, strides, and short hill repeats. Hopefully I’ll then be able to parlay those things into some really fast interval workouts in a couple months when the weather breaks, and when you add it all together, maybe just maybe I’ll be pretty fit…..for an old man at least. Hammer on!