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. :)
2 Weeks to Oakland Half Marathon
Grand Total: 40.71 miles
* 27.31 easy
* 9 moderate
* 4.4 speed work
Not a perfect week & not without its share of setbacks, but if I'm objective about it, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been at least reasonably solid.
Monday: Karate + strength work
Tuesday: 8 easy. A chilly, windy evening in SF! I did not feel optimistic about this run starting out, but as I warmed up I felt better & finished reasonably strong.
Wednesday: 2 wu + 12 x hill repeats + 2.2 easy = 5.6. I finally sucked it up & tried the hill repeats workout from the half marathon schedule I'm following. I was not a fan. You can read more about why here.
Thursday: 2 wu + 5 3 x 1600m + 3 easy = 8. On my schedule, this was 3-4 x 10:00 @ 10K pace, but given the heat & the fact that I'd just done a (sort of) not-easy workout the day before, I decided to change it to 5 x 1600m. My first three repeats were hard, but I was keeping up a reasonable 10K pace. My right Achilles had been bugging me since Tuesday & I'd been stretching it between repeats. Then about 100 yards into the 4th, a slicing/searing pain came out of nowhere & went shooting down through it and into my heel. Clearly no more repeats were happening. After a little rest & stretching, I got a few more easy miles on, but even those were ASS hard and the Achilles / right heel was unhappy the whole time.
Friday: 9 easy moderate. I just wanted these miles done, so I decided to push the pace a little. Essentially, I was shooting for fast, but reasonably comfortable (I didn't want to trash my legs for my weekend runs). I had my Garmin set to where only distance was showing, so I was a little surprised to see that my first mile auto lap was 8:04. (Normally if I'm running at an easy, casual pace, that first lap getting out of the neighborhood is in the 9:15-9:30 range). I tried to just stick with fast-but-comfortable and really couldn't believe that every mile split was coming up faster than the last, even though I didn't feel like I was working all that hard (plus hills, wind, pedestrians, etc). When I hit 7:42 for mile 5, I actively backed off -- that's basically HM pace, and again with the not trashing my legs. Still, all my remaining miles were sub-8:00, none of them felt particularly hard, and I finished feeling like I could've gone plenty further at the same pace. Super encouraging vis-à-vis Oakland in 2.5 weeks. :)
Saturday: 14 easy 10.11 easy. The weather was nice in the morning so I decided to switch my long run & HM pace miles & do the long run Saturday. Alas, a bunch of leg/foot pain (including the weird Achilles pain) caused me to stop at ten. I could have done more, but worried I might do more damage than good. (Even putting weight on my right leg afterwards was uncomfortable.)
Sunday: Rest. I knew I'd just have to wait & see Sunday how my Achilles, et al. were feeling. As of that morning my right leg was still pretty sore. Not so sore that I couldn't have conceivably done a few easy miles on it, but I decided to bite the bullet & take two days of rest now & hope it's feeling better later in the week rather than push it any further for the sake of padding this week's miles.
So yes, some disappointing moments, but still my 2nd highest mileage week so far this year, and the fast, easy Friday run was encouraging. Trying to focus on the positives (and there really are plenty) rather than getting bogged down in those very few things that haven't been ideal. Things I'm trying to keep in mind for next week (and further)...
- Get a track/"hard" session done on Tuesday -- it makes it easier to space the others more evenly through the rest of the week.
- If I do end up needing to do two "hard" sessions back-to-back, be careful about which ones they are -- hill sprints & mile repeats @ 10K pace back-to-back probably played into the Achilles trouble. (But something like hill repeats & HM intervals back-to-back would probably be okay.)
- The hamstring trouble was most likely from the Friday strength testing, which was a one-time thing. Having it on the same side as the Achilles pain was probably just bad luck.
Next week will be a good one. Two more weeks to Oakland!!! :D
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