Training Recap: 3/28 - 4/3

This week was a bit of a bust, although not a horrible one by an means. I had planned on running 6 or 7 days and only wound up running 5. Additionally, I took one of those 5 as a really easy day, and as a result my mileage was a good bit lower than what I originally intended to run. I think what got me was a couple things. First, while my average HR is already starting to come down, it's still pretty high at the pace I've been running. Essentially I've been running with others most days and hate to feel like I'm slowing them down too much, so I've probably been going a little faster than I should for my current fitness level. The pace might be slow for what I'm accustomed to, but my HR tells me the effort is much harder. In the end, all my days have probably been what I would call "moderate' days, which normally means running around 6:30 per mile but currently is much slower. Too many days like that will wear you down, and I think I experienced a bit of that this week. Additionally, around mid-week I started to feel like I was getting sick. I'm not sure if it was a cold coming on or just an allergy flare-up, but I had a sore throat, a good bit of congestion, and just felt like I was dragging in general. Add all that up, and it made for a less than optimal training scenario.

On the good side, my heel is continuing to hold up, and in fact, on Saturday I did my first run in a shoe other than Hokas since December. I also ran four 30-second strides that day, which was the first time I've run anything up-tempo since early January. I definitely feel like things are starting to come together and I'm looking forward to having a good week of training this week. I want to start varying my pace up at least a little because the strides on Saturday actually felt really good. I think too much running all at the same pace can sometimes cause problems, so while base-building will continue to be my focus for the foreseeable future, I think I need to mix it up at least a little as I go along.

I'll conclude with another old man note for the week. Sean Wade, who at age 50 ran a 14:52 5k last weekend, moved up to 10k this weekend and went 30:48. He's now set five 50+ age group world records in 56 days, breaking the records for the indoor 1500, mile, and 3k, and the outdoor 5k and 10k. Awesome!