Monday - Thursday: Sick, didn't run.
Friday: 11 miles w/ 4 mile lactate threshold run. I took a few more days off than I thought I strictly needed, just to make sure that I really was in fact healthy before I started up running again (I have a history of coming back too soon and prolonging my time off), but today's workout included an LT phase that I really didn't want to miss. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to actually get around to running until fairly late at night, so I ended up having to do the workout on the treadmill :-/. On the other hand, this gave me an opportunity to calibrate my pacing, which has been difficult to do recently with all the ice and snow on the ground (I often end up plodding more than actually running, since you can't really run full speed through snow and ice). Overall I think it went fairly well for where I'm at in my training schedule, but it's also pretty clear that I'm going to need to take full advantage of the V0_2 max and speed workouts later in my training cycle, as my top speed right now is not what it should be.
Saturday: 6 miles, recovery.
Sunday: 20 miles, long run (also my birthday :-D!) This was actually the first time I'd run outside in a while, and I had some glorious weather for it: it was a bright, clear day and a balmy 40 degrees or so outside. I set out this morning planning to do the Fresh Pond + extended Boston Common & Commonwealth Ave loop.
Unfortunately, in spite of the very nice weather today, the running conditions were atrocious. We had some more snow earlier in the week, which had not been cleared off the running paths. This, combined with the relatively warm (i.e., above freezing) weather we've had the past couple of days, together with some actual rain yesterday night, meant that large portions of the running trails along the Charles consisted of ice sheets with standing water on top of them. It was actually pretty ridiculous - when the snowplows clear the streets, they do so by literally piling up huge snowbanks on the sidewalks, which eventually ice over. When it rains, the water collects on these ice sheets, and ends up melting little channels into the middle of them, which actually has the effect of making it harder to get rid of the water, as it now is not able to run off. This has been a feature here on and off since December or so, but today was BY FAR the worst I've ever seen it. There were some sections where there was so much standing water, and the snowbanks on either side were so high, that you literally had to just run through ankle-deep standing water over ice. The trail around Fresh Pond was particularly bad - it was literally a continuous sheet of ice all the way around the reservoir. Seriously, this shit was deadly.
In fact, as I was coming up the BU side of the Charles to finish up my run, I ended up slipping on an ice sheet when crossing over the River Street bridge and busting my hip (oh the irony! As if I were not already aware of my now-acutely-advanced age!).
Needless to say, my last four miles were not particularly quick.
However, prior to my embarrassing display of decrepitude, I had been more keenly focused on keeping the intensity up than I have been previously on the long runs (as a result of my treadmill calibration a couple of days ago), so I think that that, together with the fact that this was longest run to date for this training cycle, this ended up working out pretty well.
Total weekly mileage: 37 <--Again, not so great :-/.
BONUS MATERIAL: So in addition to today being my birthday, it was also SuperBowl Sunday, and several of my friends in the MIT Media Lab were hosting a SuperBowl viewing party. The Media Lab is definitely one of my favorite places on campus - walking into the building is like stepping into the future, and there's always a ton of really cool shit going on, so I knew this event couldn't fail to be epic. As it turned out, that was indeed the case. Apparently the Media Lab has one room devoted to a gigantic TV called the "4 x 4". I say TV, but really it's a composite display which is itself made out of 16 big-screen TV arranged in 4 rows of 4. In fact, it's actually so large that it's really not in a room as much as it's in a 2 story atrium on the third floor of the building (it's not clear to me that it would actually fit into one of the labs there - it's got a 144" screen :-D!).
BEST. VIEWING PARTY. EVER. :-).
2 comments:
Cupcake, just so you know, Snowpocalyse 2011 is the worst winter that Boston has had in like at least 30 years. It won't suck this much to run every winter!
I would recommend maybe finding some large roads with better plowed sidewalks and/or smaller streets that you can just run fairly safely on the street. This is one of my Cambridge favorites:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4282116
Hey Megumi,
Thanks for the tip - I may try that out tomorrow as part of my long run :-).
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