Mon: 10.5 miles, including 5k race
Tue: 7.5 miles
Wed: 7 miles, including strides and hill sprints
Thu: 3 miles
Fri: 7.5 miles steady
Sat: 7 miles, plus strides and drills
Sun: 13.5 miles
Total: 56 miles
This was another sub-par week to cap off what turned out to be a poor month. It’s funny, because I remember being in late-April and feeling like I was ready to have a great month and really start to build some positive momentum, and here I am 4-5 weeks later with exactly the opposite having happened. I guess that’s the way it goes sometimes.
Anyway, I started the week off with a race, and you can read my recap of that event here. The course that day was tough and I ran pretty hard, so in hindsight I think it may have taken a little more out of me than I would have originally expected. I didn’t feel too bad the day after the race, but from there I started to feel progressively more worn down. Furthermore, I did something in my run on Wednesday that caused my chronic right achilles to flare up, so much so that I wound up not only bailing out of the workout I had planned for Thursday but I even cut the run short altogether. I’m pretty sure what aggravated my achilles was doing a barefoot mile at the end of my run on Wednesday. My idea was to do a little barefoot running once or twice a week to help strengthen my feet, ankles, and lower legs, ultimately making my achilles better, but after doing a few barefoot sessions now, it appears the opposite happens and it just makes things worse. I’ve tried to ease into it, so that’s not the issue, and I’m just going to scrap the idea going forward.
Fortunately my achilles felt better on Friday, but I didn’t feel that stellar overall and also had to fit my running in around my daughter’s dance recital. As a result, I wound up with a fairly short run, albeit it at a steady pace of sub-6:40 for the majority of the miles. I came back and did some strides and drills on Saturday then finished the week off with a long run Sunday morning. I had originally planned on doing some intervals inside my long run, but I managed to irritate my back and hip on Saturday and didn’t want to push my luck by running hard with something not quite right. As is, my back and hip loosened up nicely and felt fine, but the same couldn’t be said for the rest of my body. Granted this was a really hilly run with a lot of climbing in the first half, but by the end my hamstrings were feeling fatigued and I was starting to struggle, even though the pace was fairly tame at around 6:50 per mile give or take a few sec.
I hope I can get my training turned around starting this coming week. I’ve been roller-coasting it for quite a while now, and I’ve certainly been on a downhill for the past several weeks. What I would like to do is stop with the peaks and valleys and get on a slow, gradual improvement curve that lasts for a long time. I’ve tried to adjust my training to accommodate for just that, but so far I haven’t really seen any results. The hotter weather coming up isn’t going to help either, but it is what it is. Time to buckle down, get tough, and try to make things happen!
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