There are certain running puns that make my eyes roll so far back in my head I'm in danger of losing them. "In the long run." "Back on track." Anything involving the word "half" when you're running/training for a half marathon.
But here I am, about to say that I am {cringes} "back on track" this week after last weekend's minor shit show. And I wasn't going to say it, but then I was going to write something about how it feels getting back on the track again after a hiatus, and {sigh}...
Welp. Here we are. Back on track.😬
Grand Total: 47.75 miles
🐌 Easy: 38.75 easy
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 6 miles
🐎 Speed: 3 miles
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 23.2% vs. %76.8%
Monday 2/6: 6 easy. This was really the six miles I didn't manage in Tahoe that got shoved to Monday.
Tuesday 2/7: 1 hour strength + 8 easy.
Wednesday 2/8: 2.5 warm up, 6 x (800m @ 10K pace / 2:30 jog), 3 cool down 6 easy. We had some friends coming for dinner so I wanted to get this workout started & finished a bit earlier than usual. But it was one of those days when for some reason I just felt like trash. We all have those days of course and more often than not by the time I get to the track and do some strides, I'm like, "Okay cool, I can handle this" and then it's fine. But other days are different; it wasn't "Oof, I'm a bit tired today," it was that kind of bone-deep fatigue that sometimes occurs the day after a long run or big workout, even though I hadn't done anything like that since the previous Saturday.
Running to the track involves negotiating three pretty steep uphill blocks in a row that I usually use as an opportunity for some uphill strides instead of slogging up them at warm-up pace. As soon as they came into view, though, I thought, "This is not a good idea. Trying to run honest 800ms while feeling this way is asking for trouble."
So instead I made it an easy six, which still felt long and exhausting. But at least I got home for dinner with our friends a bit earlier!
Thursday 2/9: 2.5 warm up, 6 x (800m @ 10K pace / 2:30 jog), 3 cool down = 9.75 total. Track session take two! I was bummed to find that I felt just as bad when I started my run on Thursday as I had the day before. Something about heading to the track feeling like that was kind of depressing, so the whole way towards Golden Gate Park I kept hemming and hawing, "I'm racing roads, not track, I could just do half-miles on JFK Promenade?? Ehhh but that's uneven and it's kind of windy and I'd have to do a bunch of back-and-forth. GOD but track sounds so miserable right now, I just cannot. But it's so much easier to work on good form and stuff, vs. concrete?? Ohhh I know, laps of the upper 0.4-mile blacktop track! Ugh but there's so many people walking around up there. Okay FINE, one interval on the track just to see how miserable it is and how slow these reps are going to be."
Then, friends, I managed to set my data screen wrong so that instead of "average lap pace" all I could see was average pace for the entire run thus far. This means I had no idea how fast I was running for the first 800m but I felt like I was absolutely dragging; I was targeting ~7:10ish pace (so ~3:35 per 800m) and just knew I was going to see a 4:00-4:10 split or something. So imagine how stunned I was to see 3:23. 🤦🏻♀️😂
Once I got my watch set correctly, I found I was able to crank out the rest of the 800ms between 3:28-3:32 pretty comfortably. (I mean, not comfortably-comfortably, but completely doable with a little effort, no wishing for death or anything.) Didn't see that coming, but hey, I'll take it!
This is a lesson I've learned over and over and yet somehow it never seems to stick. Warm-ups are not always indicative of how a workout or race is going to feel. You can feel like garbage, sometimes, and still run just fine, even well. As we said last week, you don't always have to feel good doing it, you just have to get it done.
Friday 2/10: Rest. Oh & a much-needed massage.☺️
Saturday 2/11: 4 easy. I was hoping that Friday's rest day and massage would have me feeling good for this short little recovery run. And on the one hand, I did feel good, or at least fine. I felt rested and refreshed and slept well and everything. My legs, on the other hand, still felt like trash. In retrospect I think this was a combination of increasing mileage, the track workout, and some of the massage work that was really pretty aggressive in terms of loosening up some problematic areas in my calves, shins, and feet. So running was just sort of mildly uncomfortable in that pounding-sort-of-way that happens when your legs have been doing a lot. So this run was really more of a shuffle that felt much longer than it was (and I was very happy when it was over).
Sunday 2/12: 6 easy + 6 mile progression cut-down (marathon to HM pace) + 2 cool down = 14 long. After Saturday, I was a little worried about how my body was going to feel for this run. It is the longest run I've done since September and the biggest, most demanding workout I've done since I can't remember when. 13 days out from Victory Half, I knew it was a key workout that I really needed to nail both physically and mentally to feel really confident I was ready to race.
So, I was nervous to wake up feeling the same battered feeling in my legs as the day before. As with Saturday, I still generally felt fresh and rested and well-recovered; it was just the fatigue & beat-up feeling in my legs.
The first few easy miles did not inspire confidence. My stride did not feel smooth and comfortable at all and my first mile split was 10:52, slow even for my usual super-slow first mile. Even a few miles in I still felt like I was kind of hobbling-slash-limping along at 9:20 pace and could not *imagine* how I was going to pick this up to sub-9:00 pace, let alone run an 8:00 mile, let alone run five more miles in which I continued cutting down to 7:30ish. Definitely one of those workouts where, before I'd even started the hard part, I was already mentally drafting an email to my coach along the lines of, "Sorry, felt like trash, a few ~9:00 miles was all I could manage without dying."
But one of my (very few) rules about workouts is "Don't assume you can't do it, you have to at least try and *actually* fail vs. just deciding you'll probably fail and not trying at all." If you can't do the workout, that's one thing, but it's actually very useful to attempt the workout and at least learn to what extent you can't do it.
So at the conclusion of warm-up mile six, I popped a gel and said, "OK, legs, let's see what you got." And...clicked off a pretty comfortable 8:01 mile? So far so good, maybe one more a bit faster?? And then a 7:50, after trying and trying and trying and failing to ease it back to ~7:55ish.
And so on and so forth, until I'd ticked off miles in 7:44, 7:40, and 7:35, then found myself wrapping things up to the tune of 7:20 pace (again trying and trying and trying to easy up juuust a bit, finally clicking off 7:25 for the last workout split).
Most pleasing Strava sight
Best of all friends, none of those miles felt all that hard. Like yes, they took some amount of effort, but not push-push-push effort; more just, keep-the-foot-on-the-gas-and-wait-it-out levels of effort. At no point did I feel like any of those paces were unbearably hard or potentially not doable for a mile. So yeah; once again, you can't always trust how you feel beforehand. Always at least give it a shot.
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- First Born by
Will Dean. Back in my usual crime/mystery/psychological thriller niche! This book is about a pair of twenty-two-year-old British
twins--one outgoing and extroverted attending Columbia on a full ride
sponsorship (Katie), while her mousy, introverted, pathologically
anxious sister (Molly) hides out in her condo back in London. But when
Molly's parents call to tell her that Katie has been murdered while
they're visiting her in New York, Molly must steel herself to fly to the
U.S. to support her parents and the investigation of Katie's death.
- Run Time by Catherine Ryan Howard. Another mystery/thriller with a twenty-two-year-old woman at the center. Once a rising star, recently disgraced actress Adele Rafferty has left her native Ireland for LA in a desperate (and thus far unsuccessful) attempt to revive her career. When she's offered the lead in a small, hush-hush indie horror film back in Ireland out of the blue, the deal seems almost too perfect. But when Adele starts to feel as if the eerie events of the script are happening around her for real, she starts asking uncomfortable--and potentially dangerous--questions.
- Pro Running News (podcast): Stepping Up To The Marathon. This isn't my usual go-to running podcast genre, yet I regularly find myself clicking over to hear what Matt and David have to say about the day's goings-on in professional running. They talk about a mix of topics ranging from pro running contracts to sports/running physiology to how race courses are measured to what the heck is going on with Strava in a way that's smart and compelling and reasonably detailed but also accessible to the lay-runner. This episode discussed how and when and why middle distance runners move up to the marathon and what the various challenges are compared to the very different challenging of running shorter track races.
- Burnt Toast (podcast): Virginia Sole-Smith describes her podcast as "Weekly conversations about how we dismantle diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting, health and fashion" and I am here for it. The episode I listened to this week was an interview with Lauren Leavell (of Leavell Up Fitness). Like many people Lauren grew up with a borderline unhealthy relationship with exercise and movement and has not only reclaimed it as something that makes her feel happy and more herself but also begun an inclusive, body-neutral fitness group that is explicitly NOT driven by aesthetic goals like "Get that summer body!" or "Do a million miserable squats to get a giant booty!" I always love hearing from people who take a radically inclusive view of exercise and movement and work to actively divorce those absolute gifts of human existence from the gross fatphobic diet culture in which society is unfortunately awash at present.
Less than two weeks out friends!
In Case You Missed It:
Victory Half Week 1 of 8Victory Half Week 2 of 8
Victory Half Week 3 of 8
Victory Half Week 4 of 8
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