Aloha, again

I spent most of last week in Honolulu for work, and as typically happens when I'm traveling and all sorts of crazy stuff is going on, things got a bit wacky what with all the shifting around of various workouts (mostly due to time). For all that work travel is not nearly as glamorous as some people seem to think, I have to say there are worse places a person could get sent for four days with a great team of co-workers to hang out with.

The view from dinner

Pool did not suck

Barefoot nighttime beach walk back to the hotel after dinner with the team

The story of the last two few weeks seems to be that bodies are weird, running is weird, and who can ever say why different workouts sometimes feel effortless (well, okay, maybe not effortless, exactly) & other days like you're going to die 10% of the way in. Apparently 3 x 2 @ HM pace is the Death Workout, but just a few days later 6 x 1 @ LT pace (so ~0:15-20/mile faster) is NBD? One day I can barely finish 4 miles and cranking it to marathon pace for even one mile is impossible, and the next day 10 miles with 6 of them slightly faster than marathon pace feels pedestrian? What the what?

I'm sure it's all related to rest/recovery/sleep and how those things fluctuate with my travel schedule, but man, it's been making for some drama-filled training.

* * *

PRIDEMEET 5K WEEK 4:

Grand Total: 38 miles + 1 hour strength

* 26 easy
* 6 speed
* 6 tempo/threshold

With three weeks left until PrideMeet, keeping the fast mileage up but starting to cut back on the easy stuff a bit. I don't think any of these miles happened on the actual days on which they were assigned, but hey, they got done!

Monday 5/30: Rest

We roasted a whole pig on Sunday so Memorial Day was a massive sleep in/cleanup day.

Tuesday 5/31: a.m. strength work / p.m. 2 warm up, 6 x 1 mile @ LT pace / 1:30 recovery, 2 cool down Get bogged down from dawn til dusk with work. Hmph.

Strength work this week = deadlifts (80 lbs), lat pulls (60 lbs), dumbbell presses (30 lbs), clamshells, bridge marches, & a hundred-some-odd crunches. I am freaking determined to keep myself from getting injured, and once a week is more than none per week.

Wednesday 5/31: a.m. fly to Hawai'i / p.m. 2 warm up, 6 x 1 mile @ LT pace / 1:30 recovery, 2 cool down

I really wanted to go do this run somewhere cool & scenic, but Waikiki is crowded and urban and I didn't really know the area well and LT pace is also pretty darn fast to be dodging pedestrians & throwing on the breaks/screwing up the intervals with stop lights. Between that & the heat of mid-day (when I finished work), I just opted to do it on the hotel treadmill in the A/C, which, yes, seems kind of lame, but it was worth it to not worry about the route & just focus on getting the workout done.

Given how god-awful my last two threshold workouts have been (3 x 2 miles @ HM pace in both cases), I was utterly dreading 6 mile repeats 0:15-0:20/mile FASTER than HM pace, so I was a bit surprised to find that these were actually pretty easy. (Maybe easy isn't the right word, exactly, but completely doable without any sense of I-am-literally-about-to-fall-off-the-treadmill-and/or-die about them. In other news, I am not sure I have ever done six mile repeats in a workout before, so that's sort of neat?)

Thursday 6/1: 8 easy

RIGHT, that thing that happens once you start actually training again, where you run a hard workout, and no matter how great it went, the next day's "easy" run feels like you've been hit by a cross town bus. But you can only be so cranky when you can stop every couple of miles to appreciate the scenery.



Also try explaining to your co-workers why instead of joining them on the beach, you're opting to run 8 miles in 85F heat & 80% humidity. On the plus side, there were some less crowded, nice dirt trails in the southern part of Waikiki, which I appreciated.

Friday 6/2: 2 warm up, 6 @ marathon pace, 2 cool down 6 easy.

Sadly time was super tight Friday so this was all I had time for (yes, once again while my colleagues were chilling on the beach before our dinner meeting.)

Saturday 6/3: 2 warm up, 6 @ marathon pace, 2 cool down 4 easy

I tried moving the threshold run to Saturday morning before my flight, but even by 7:30am the heat and humidity were just utterly intolerable. Less than a mile into the warm-up & running 10:30-11:00 miles, I was dripping & felt just completely miserable. I tried running one marathon pace mile and all I got from my body was a big fat NOPE!

I think it's maybe once or twice a year that I actually go out, truly attempt a workout, and end up having to can it because I just cannot physically do it for whatever reason, but this was one. The target pace was 8:06 and 8:12 felt like 5K-10K race effort. So I finished one more easy (it was not easy) mile & decided to try again tomorrow once I was back home & had some rest.

Sunday 6/4: 8 easy 2 warm up, 6 @ marathon pace, 2 cool down = 10 total

Done and dusted! Six threshold miles, 7:59 average pace with no trouble whatsoever. (I didn't mean to run them quite that fast, especially with the hills & headwind, but my GPS was apparently lying to me a bit.) Glad I was able to fit this one in Sunday since I didn't have a long run this week.

Just two weeks left to go, and I am trying hard not to think about what running 5Ks feels like....