Mon: 5 miles
Tue: 6.5 miles
Wed: 8.5 miles, including strides
Thu: 7 miles
Fri: 9.5 miles, including fartlek workout
Sat: 6.5 miles
Sun: 14 miles
Total: 57 miles
This was an ok week. It certainly wasn’t ideal by any means, but it was an improvement over the past 2-3 weeks and at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully I can use this to build some momentum, and once the Holiday Season is over, I can get serious with my training and start prepping for the 2014 track season and the goals I have set for myself.
I started the week with what was basically a test run for my knee. I was coming off three days of no running and just wanted to see how things would go. Fortunately I didn’t feel any pain at all, so accordingly I bumped up the mileage a little the next day to see how that would go. Once again, everything was fine, so I then proceeded to ease back into normal training.
I ran some strides towards the end of my run on Wednesday, a fairly controlled 8X100, again trying to test my knee out, this time at a different pace. That went well too, so I figured a light workout would be appropriate for Friday. For that workout, I did a fartlek consisting of 1-1-2-2-4-2-2-1-1- min on with 1 min recoveries. With the short recoveries, this was essentially a broken up tempo run, and I wound up averaging 5:36 pace. Considering the fact I was being conservative, partially because I hadn’t run fast in a while and partially because this was sort of a final test of the knee, I was fairly pleased to run as fast as I did. After an easy day on Saturday, I concluded the week with a 14 mile long run on Sunday.
I feel fortunate to have dodged the knee issue as easily as I did and I think the extra rest was actually a blessing in disguise since it gave me a little extra time to recover from what I feel was a bout of overtraining. I’m feeling pretty good now aside from the fact that my upper legs, particularly my hamstrings, are fatiguing more than they should be. That’s the next issue I’m working on addressing. I’ve stepped up my stretching, foam rolling, etc. and also started some strengthening. I’m also continuing to get treatment at Balance Chiropractic. Between all that, I’m hoping to get everything under control over the next couple weeks.
Obviously the past few weeks have not gone according to plan, and the next couple are going to be very busy with Holiday activities, so like I said at the beginning of this post, my current goal is to get everything straightened out and have myself ready to go by the start of the new year. With all the various things going, I knew mid-November to late-December would be a challenging time for training, and it wound up being more so than I thought it might be. Still, I think I’m in pretty good position to get down to business soon and maybe doing too much this early when my peak season is in the April-May timeframe wouldn’t have been good anyway. Time to close this year out on a positive note and build some momentum for a great 2014, and here’s wishing you the same!
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