Tell Me It's Just Stress

This week wasn't perfect, but, hey! It makes one more where I've had the time & bandwidth to at least ATTEMPT every run on the schedule, and it also included two double-digit workouts. Honestly I'm kind of amazed at how beat up my legs feel after this 33+ mile week (they feel like it was at least 50), but I think that's at least partly still working back up to higher mileage & longer/harder workouts after a bit of a holiday break.

(I've also had a lot of work stress recently, and I think we all know that mental/emotional stress slows healing/recovery, so that could also be part of it.)

~*~*~ STOW LAKE STAMPEDE: Week 6 of 14 ~*~*~

Grand Total: 33.15 miles

* 7.5 easy
* 6.65 speed
* 6 threshold
* 13 long

Monday 2/11: Rest. It's funny how your body so quickly becomes unaccustomed to long runs. Monday confirmed that YEP! 13 miles is long for me right now. Totally doable. But long.

Tuesday 2/12: 2 warm up, 6 x mile @ 10K pace / 1:30 jog, 1.5 cool down = 10.15 total

Wednesday 2/13: Rest

Thursday 2/14: 8 easy Aborted after one block, rest

If your memory is good you might recall that last week, after my easy Thursday run, I had a funny pain in my right shin that didn't feel at all like a stress reaction, but was still really uncomfortable and too painful to run on the next day. This week it showed up after Tuesday's track workout. I hoped after a day off I'd be good to go on Thursday but that was definitely not the case.

Just walking around the house, I couldn't really tell if it was discomfort or actual pain, so I got all dressed & everything to run, then had to call it after one block of easy jogging. It was actual pain, and I was more interested in getting the threshold run in the next day than gritting my teeth through the easy eight. Sigh.

Friday 2/15: 2 warm up, 6 @ AT pace (MP + 0:10ish), 1.5 cool down = 10 total

Man, if it's not one thing, it's something else. The weird tibia thing was gone by Friday afternoon (yay!), but in so many other ways this run was plagued by dysfunction.

1) I forgot to take my inhaler before I left (probably due to a stressful work situation I was dealing with Friday afternoon), so I was pretty much having asthma attacks the entire time. 2) The Chinese food from two hours earlier decided to spontaneously not sit well in my guts about halfway through the AT miles (NOT FUN). 3) My watch was just being nuts, like in the first mile, jumping around between 9:00 and 7:45 (target pace 8:14) when I was pretty sure my pace was pretty steady (really discouraging when you're already not feeling great). 4) The asthma got REALLY bad in the last half of the one really up-hill mile, so I had to way, way back off the pace even though otherwise it was totally fine.

I tried to make up for the really slow half mile by running the last one a bit faster (it's slightly downhill, so it makes sense), and was pretty happy to see that I was able to run it in ~7:43, quite comfortably, asthma & all.

So, I dunno, file this workout under "I gave it what I had under the circumstances, hopefully SOMETHING was accomplished."

Saturday 2/16: Rest.

Part of me had toyed with an easy run on Saturday since I didn't do one Thursday, but then I woke up on Saturday and my legs were like NOPE! Not happening. I wanted to be able to do my long run on Sunday so rest it was.

Sunday 2/17: 13 long

You know how I said earlier that 13 miles feels long right now? Still true! I could not believe how slowly the miles rolled by. My legs got it done without any weird pain, but they were definitely tired and fatigued from the very start. Like, basically, these days, a day of rest in between quality runs feels the way back-to-back quality runs used to. A week from my 38th birthday, I'm just hoping this is run-of-the-mill stress & not the beginning of The Decline. (This is why getting beaten by a lady in a higher age bracket than me continues to make my day, BTW. Also if she was faster when she was my age just don't tell me.)