Mon: AM – 4 miles; PM – 7 miles
Tue: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 8.5 miles, including strides and drills
Wed: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 10 miles, including fartlek
Thu: 7 miles
Fri: AM – 4.5 miles; PM – 9.5 miles, including turnover work
Sat: 6.5 miles
Sun: 15 miles
Total: 81 miles
This was a pretty good week and I feel like I’m at least starting to adjust to getting back into full volume training. However, I’m definitely battling tired, heavy legs at times, which affects my ability to run fast, and since working on speed has to be my priority, if I can’t get on top that soon I may have to back off the mileage a bit so my legs feel better on workout days. I’m currently searching for my “sweet spot” in weekly mileage, which would be the most miles I can run while still having my legs feel good enough to hit the desired paces in workouts. I’m thinking it will fall somewhere in the 70-80 miles per week range, but it may have to start on the low end of that then gradually work towards the higher end.
As for the specifics of the week that was, this was a pretty typical week for me, which is something that’s about to change (more on that later). After an easy day on Monday, I did some strides and drills on Tuesday to help loosen my legs up for the workout the next day. Too bad it didn’t work, because by Wednesday afternoon my legs were feeling LOUSY and the rain that was falling didn’t help. The workout was a 5/4/3/2/1 min fartlek and I wasn’t expecting much at all. It turned out pretty good though. We started conservatively with 5:45 pace for the first interval, then went 5:29 pace for the second, 5:22 pace for the third, 5:17 pace for the fourth, and finished at 5:02 pace. It was a nice cut-down of the pace and the faster paced running actually felt better than the slower warm-up and cool-down.
After an easy day on Thursday, I did 5X30 sec, 5X60 sec, 5X30 sec, all with 60 sec recovery, on Friday, and followed that up with an easy day on Saturday then the usual Sunday long run. This week’s long run was on the Jackson River Trail, which is a great place to run, but for whatever reason I never seem to feel that good when I go there. It wasn’t a bad run, and the majority of the miles were either a little under or just over 7 min, but overall the pace was slower than last week’s long run but didn’t feel as good.
I’ve hit 77 and 81 miles the past two weeks respectively and had planned on one more up week this week before taking a down week next week. That’s still the plan, but this week will also mark a major change in my training as I hand the coaching reigns off to someone else. I’ve always said that I make a better coach for others than I do for myself, and after putting some thought into it, I decided it was time for me to get some outside perspective. It’s not that I’ve had a bad 2+ years since starting back after losing most all of 2010, but at the same time, I haven’t gotten the results I’ve been seeking. I realized that if I continue coaching myself, I’m likely to keep doing basically the same things I’ve been doing, and outside of improving via consistency, that’s not likely to yield drastically different results. Furthermore, I felt like I needed to seek out someone who might take my training in a different direction that it’s ever really gone before. I wanted someone whose overall philosophy I agreed with but someone who had different methods of getting there than I’ve always used.
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