I Am Soooo Ready to Race

This was a short training week due to our spending the weekend wine tasting in Paso Robles for my birthday.

Okay, fine, it's because one of our wineries was holding their preview weekend & we had to taste everything & decide what to order. But it was still my birthday, & I still got to drink amazing wine & eat fantastic food on it.

We spent my birthday morning tasting the wines of our excellent acquaintance Jacob Toft in the Denner barrel room. He's been getting some great press lately, which is so wonderful.

Jacob worked at L'Aventure (the winery we were down to preview at, incidentally) for some years, which is where we got to know him. He is now working on his own wine full time now, & because they tend to sell out SUPER fast, this is the first time we've been on top of things enough to get in touch with him ahead of time & arrange to taste his stuff.

We were not disappointed & left with half a case! His wines have a lot in common with what we've come to love about the L'Aventure wines -- big, complex, well-balanced, & age-worthy. Look him up (by which I mean email him ahead of time) the next time you're in Paso.

Down in the winery guts, where they do fancy wine science.
(Wine making is basically just the delicious parts of chemistry.)

I finished this week tired (11 straight days of running is a LOT for me), but feeling sooooo ready to get back to racing.

Grand Total: 31.5 miles

* 23.5 easy
* 4 threshold / tempo
* 4 speed / intervals

Monday 2/18: 4 miles easy. I normally don't run the day after my long runs but since it was a short week & Monday was a holiday, I decided to get in a few easy ones. Normally I feel a little hungover the day after a long run, but I felt AMAZING. No lingering soreness. No aches in my feet. No feeling slow & sluggish.

My Garmin was being a little bitch (again) so I don't know what my pace was, but if I had to guess I would speculate that I was probably down in the 8:20-8:30 range again. It's when I can do easy runs at that pace and have it legitimately feel easy and comfortable that I know that I'm starting to kind-of-sort-of get back into race shape. I can also tell because the few moderate hills between my house & my usual turnaround no longer make me feel like I want to die & instead just make me go, "Oh, right, there's a little hill here." I actually would have gone out an extra mile & back for 6 total if I'd known that our karate class was going to end up cancelled. Ah, well.

Tuesday 2/19:

• Lunch time - Strength work.
• Evening - Speed / intervals. 2 warm up; 4 x (1200m @ 5K pace / 3:00 rec); 1.5 cool down = 7.5. Technically this was supposed to be 4 x 5:00 @ 5K pace, but I've found that you can pretty much set your watch by my running 1200's at 5K pace in 5:00, so I decided to go by distance rather than time because it's easier on my brain.
  

  #clockwork.

  I warmed up in my Kinvaras, then wore the new flats for the first three intervals. Towards the end of that third recovery jog, I could feel in my calves & Achilles(es?) that I was kind of pushing the limit of what they are really capable of in flats right now, so I switched back into the Kinvaras for the last 1200m (which felt really freaking weird). I am love love LOVING these new guys & I promise to write a review soon! (Like, for realsies, as opposed to my other recent shoe reviews. Which are non-existent.)

  The awesome part was that this run did not even feel hard. Not two 1200s, not two 1200s with an 800 in the middle, but four, and at legit 5K pace, not ugh-I-know-I'm-not-in-great-shape-so-I'm-lowering-my-expectations-kinda-sorta 5K pace. Other than the little twinge in my calf, I finished feeling like I hadn't done a speed session at all, which was pretty cool.

Wednesday 2/20:

• Lunch time - Pilates. Arrrgggghhhh hip flexors. Clearly those are what need the most work right now. Also, anyone need some new hamstring exercises? Because I can help you out with that. I have learned more new hamstring exercises in this class than you probably ever want to know about.
• Afternoon - 4 miles easy on the 'mill. I have to give myself a little pep talk each and every time now where I remind myself that slower is not necessarily easier and it's actually more comfortable for me to do these short treadmill jaunts in the high eights than the mid nines. Also, it seems like a good audiobook may be the best way to make this contraption moderately bearable. Not fun & exciting, but bearable.
• Evening - Karate.

Thursday 2/21:

• Lunch time - Strength work.
• Evening - 8 easy. This was the one where my cardio system was being a total annoying diva & my tired musculo-skeletal system was kind of rolling its eyes & making gagging motions. But keeping up just the same.

Friday 2/22: 2 warm up + 4 @ marathon pace + 2 cool down = 8. These were my first MP miles since CIM, and clearly my body has forgotten how to do it. It has trouble reconciling that the pace we are looking for here is both a race pace AND relatively comfortable. If you think about shifting gears in a car, it feels like this particular one is hidden in between two others right now so I can't quite lock into it. As a result I was about 15 seconds per mile too fast the whole way. Ah well; I've got 13 more weeks to nail it down, I suppose. :)

Aaaaaand next week, next week, NEXT WEEK????????? (which at this point is really this week...)

Hellz yeah, bitches; it's time to toe the effing line.