Basic Life Skills Fail

Week 10: 2/14/11 - 2/20/11 (8 weeks remain)

This week kinda sucked, although to be fair, it was mostly due to my own incompetence. I signed up for the Hyannis Half Marathon this year, and thought that it was going to be this weekend (which would have fit nicely into the planned training schedule). However, as it turns out, I misread my calendar, and the race is in fact next weekend. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this fact until I was about halfway through this week's training plan. At that point, I decided to try to switch the remaining portion of this week's workout with the corresponding portion of next week's workout, as next week's workout contains the 22 mile long run (the longest one of my training program), and I really didn't want to miss it. Unfortunately, it seems that the net effect of all this obliviousness/switching is that the overall week was kinda bland/shitty :-/. On the plus side, at least I got the long run in.

Monday: Off day.

Tuesday: 9 miles, general aerobic, on the treadmill.

Wednesday: 8 miles, general aerobic

Thursday: 7 miles, on the treadmill

Friday: 8 miles w/ 2 mile tempo. It was actually quite warm out today: 50+ degrees! Almost all of the snow is off the roads now, so I decided to go out and try for a 12 mile run w/ 7 mile tempo. Unfortunately, right when I started the tempo portion of the workout, it started bucketing rain and all the streets flooded, which made it more or less impossible to keep the tempo pace (at least for me anyway - I've found that not being able to see where you're going/placing your feet is not conducive to my running as fast as possible). Given the totality of circumstances (e.g., not having slept/eaten well the previous few days, general feeling of broken-down-ness, etc.), I decided that this actually might be one of those times to cut your losses due to rapidly diminishing returns. Fortunately, this tempo run actually came from what was supposed to have been next week's workout, so I'll actually have a chance to do it again (properly) next week, when I should not have as much work keeping me up at night. The plan is to prepare properly and do it better next week, 'cause I actually really do need to work on the LT now that the roads are clear.

Saturday: 5 miles, treadmill.

Sunday: 22 miles, long run. This run was the peak-mileage run for this training cycle, so I wanted to be sure that it was a good one. Fortunately, the roads remained clear throughout the week, so I had good terrain, and (aside some moderately stiff winds) some good weather (clear, sunny, ~ 35 degree temperature). Did the Fresh Pond Loop + Commonwealth Ave 18 mile loop, and then got tired of the wind, so I decided to head back to SidPac and do the last 4 miles on the treadmill.

I was pretty pleased with this workout - recently I've been very concerned about my LT fitness, since (due to accumulation of snow on the trails) I haven't had much of an opportunity over the previous couple of months to really get out and do some good (i.e., higher-speed) LT runs, so I was very conscious of my pace while running this workout; in some sense, my goal here was almost more psychological than physical - I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I had the LT fitness necessary to run the race at my target pace. I feel like I did a pretty good job keeping the intensity up on the outdoor section of the run (although it's a bit hard for me to tell, since I suck at gauging pace - I was mostly operating on perceived level of effort). In this vein, I will say that one of the nice things about finishing up on the treadmill is that it enabled me to directly set the pace, so I could measure how I felt running at the end of a long run at a given pace. To that end, I ran miles 19-21 on the treadmill, starting at 7:15 pace and working down to 6:30 for the last mile-and-a-half, just to see how my body was holding up at this pace after having put in 18+ miles already, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised; I definitely felt tired, but not so tired that the pace felt unsustainable - even at 6:30 pace.

That having been said, I'm still sufficiently wary regarding my overall LT fitness and top speed that I'm glad I still have some time left to work on this before the big day :-P.

Total weekly mileage: 59