This is my weekly training journal. Including it in the blog gives me a little extra accountability in the mileage department & helps me stick to my schedule. :)Sunday: 10 miles easy/moderate. A good start to the week! Yet another run with virtually no shin pain (and only a little Achilles tendon ish). I probably ran this one a little too fast (I do that sometimes...) but it felt really good to get in double digits for the second time this calendar year.
Tuesday: 3.87 miles (1 warm up + 4 x 5 minutes at 5K pace, ~.7-.75 mi each) I mentioned this run in an earlier post. I'd sort of hoped that doing slightly longer, slightly slower intervals and fewer of them might break the cycle of miserable shin splints days I've had following 400 repeats. Fair enough, there were no shin splints, but my right Achilles was still bothering me enough that I nixed the last repeat (originally planned 5) and called it a day.
Thursday: 8.13 miles easy (but hilly!) This was the day I ran with Lululemon Athletica Run Club. I jogged ~2.6 miles there, then ran with the 4.5 mile group. Unfortunately I got separated from the group & turned around a little, which resulted in running an extra mile! I didn't run this very hard, but a good bit of it was quite hilly, and I spent a lot of it dealing with rather severe Achilles tendon pain (again), so I was glad to be done. I'd decided that I would jog home if I was feeling good and BART if not. As much as I enjoyed the free post-run yoga, I decided it was best for my Achilles if I didn't push it.
Saturday: 8 miles (1 warm up + 5 tempo + 2 easy) Given the continued unhappiness of my Achilles on Thursday, I decided to take Friday off. Originally I'd planned six miles each on Friday and Saturday which would have put me at 34 for the week, but I decided that since last week was the first time I've been back at 30 in quite a while, I could be happy (and would probably be safer) resting on Friday, then doing a little extra on Saturday to make it a nice round 30. Sure enough, I woke up on Saturday with fresh, pain-free legs. I drove to the track (yay!) for my usual(ish) tempo run, then tacked on two easy miles at the end. Happily, both my shins and Achilles seemed fine throughout (huzzah for extra rest days!).
I'm kind of curious how close the pace I'm running my tempo runs at is to my actual LT pace at this point. I have a hunch it's probably somewhere between 7:30 & 8:00 / mile, so I've been aiming for around 7:40-7:45; on the other hand, there's usually wind at the track, so by keeping this pace I may actually be pushing my heart rate a little higher than it really should be for the purposes of improving LT. This is one of those times when I wish I had the cash to do one of those fancy metabolic work-ups that tells you all that.
Grand Total: 30 miles
I can't tell you how happy it makes me to get back to 30 miles for two weeks in a row, feeling (almost) completely healthy & pain-free. I will keep listening to my lower legs & taking days off when I need to, but even doing that, I'm managing to run a solid four days per week and continue building mileage. I really think that picking a key race later in the year (Clarksburg) and then spacing out several low-key, low-stakes races over the course of the summer and fall (the 10Ks) has kept me motivated in both the short- and long-term. It's helped me frame my training as more of a marathon than a sprint (hah), which has helped me act more conservatively in terms of taking rest days and cutting runs short when I need to (and interestingly, this has resulted in my actually being able to run MORE miles in the long term).
Next week -- hopefully one more 30+ week, then a little bit of a cut-back before Bad Bass on 7/30!
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