Week In Review: Aug 14 - 20

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. :)

Monday: 12 easy miserable. I'm blaming this one mostly on fight club the night before (which is why I was doing this run on Monday instead of Sunday to begin with), and a little on the warmer-than-usual weather and my stopping for water at miles 6 & 7 & that was all. This was one of the physically hardest long runs I've had in a long time.

Wednesday: 8 miles (2 warm up, 5 tempo, 1 cool down). This was my first run (other than races) with a heart monitor in a long time. I couldn't face a tempo run on the track today so I did it through Golden Gate Park, basically from Ocean Beach to the Conservatory of Flowers and back along JFK Drive, which is flat enough and traffic light-free enough to be functional. Wearing the heart rate monitor for this run was fascinating enough that it deserves a separate post, so I'll go into all that later. Still, it was a good run, and I'm tempted to start doing more tempo runs along this route (now that I'm wearing the monitor again) when I just can't face running in circles for 8 miles.

Thursday: 9 miles easy 6 miles miserable. I think for the time being, I may have to go back to taking my inhaler before every run, without fail. I've had too many runs lately where I get a mile or so in and find I can't breathe. Today was one of those. Yes, I can run through them, but not well, and not enjoyably. In addition to the obvious discomfort of not being able to transport oxygen to my cells (!), asthma also saps my strength in a more general sense. Every mile feels like I've been running for three or four times that long, in terms of how quickly my muscles fire and how strong they feel. The worst thing about that is that I very quickly find myself unable to maintain good form, which causes ghosts of all sorts of little aches & pains to pop up. It was highly unpleasant. Plus, I knew there was just no way I was going to safely get my full nine miles in, which sucked. But I did what I could.

Friday: 6.25 miles (2 warm up, 3 x 10:00 @ 10K pace (about 4 miles), .25 cool down) In spite of semi-nasty weather at Kezar, this was one of the best speed workouts I've had in a while. All three repeats felt good, I kept what I think is a reasonable pace (a little bit slower by the numbers than my actual 10K pace due to the nasty headwind that has essentially set up camp on the back stretch at Kezar Stadium), and no shin splints / Achilles pain. I actually meant to cool down with a full mile, but I had to be somewhere & ran out of time.

Saturday: 7.2 miles easy. I'd only planned to run 6, but I felt good and realized that if I could tack on an extra 1.75, it would bring me to an even 40 for the week, for the first time in nearly a year! So exciting. Alas, again, I had places to be & was already cutting it pretty close in terms of time, so I didn't quite get there.

Grand Total: 39.45 miles

Not quite back to 40 yet, but getting really close. Plus, no aches and pains (at least no significant ones)! Next week I'll probably cut back a little since I'm racing 10K on Saturday, and maybe the following week as well, but starting the first week of September, I should be ready to start busting out 40+ weeks on a regular basis. Finally feeling like I'm really, truly recovered, which gives me all sorts of mischievous ideas... :)