The Thick of It.

So what does Coach do on the heels of my highest mileage week & longest run (excepting Berkeley Half) in over a year?

Why, naturally, he assigns an 11 mile tempo run. (Ish. 2 warm up, 5 x 2K @ LT threshold / 1:15 recoveries, 2 cool down.)

I spent most of Tuesday dreading and/or fretting about this. I'd just run 13 miles two days before, done a realistically-harder-than-tempo-effort-slash-race the day before that, and last week my long run was 11 miles. Plus, although most of the time that LT/half marathon/"comfortably hard" range is totally my bag, I haven't done much running in that range post-stress fracture and 6.2 miles of it sounded like kind of a lot.

Blessedly, my warm-up went well & I didn't feel sore or overly tired or have the super-tight Achilles/lower calves to deal with that I've had on the track just about every Tuesday. Running in the mid-eights felt comfortable but not super easy, so I was still kind of nervous about trying to crank it down to the 7:25 range.

Ultimately, I'm pretty sure I kind of botched this workout. I was so up in my head and freaking out about struggling with the paces that I ended up focusing too much on the pace & not enough on my effort level, which, since most of these intervals were either uphill or into a vicious headwind or both, means that I absolutely ran some of them too hard.

I actually did 1.25's instead of 2K's because the stupid
Garmin 220 will only auto lap at multiples of .05 miles. Arrrrrgh.

Also I hate constantly looking at my watch during recovery intervals so I usually just count in my head, and apparently my counting was kind of off (though actually not quite as off as it looks, because I totally en-long-ened some of the recovery intervals slightly on purpose in order to not start the hard interval in a stupid spot or at a stupid not-nice distance mark like 5.77). Also I was running in the Park so there were water & traffic light pauses as well.

BUT! It was still a stupid long threshold run on tired legs, I still hit all the paces (actually, beat, slightly, on average) even with all the hills & ridiculous wind, and finished the run with no pain or discomfort anywhere & feeling, if anything, fresher & stronger than when I'd started. (??????!?!!!?????!?)

So I'm putting this one, if not in the WIN column, at the very least in the WIN*(?) column.

Running is weird.