Since I'm off to Southern California today and then to Dubai on Friday, this will be my last kind of "normal-ish" week of training for a while. I'm still planning (hoping?) to continue doing whatever following-of-the-training plan I can while I'm on the road, but one just never knows how things are going to work out during travel (particularly to somewhere you've never been before).
Here's how this week went down:
~*~*~ 🎡 🎡 Kaiser Permanente Half Week 4 of 13 🎡 🎡 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 36 miles
🐌 Easy: 28.2 miles
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 3 miles
🐎 Speed: 4.8 miles
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 78% vs. 22%
Monday 11/27: 2 warm up, 12 x 300m @ tempo effort / 100m jog, 2 cool down = 7 total. This was a new type of workout I've never done before--300m intervals, but at tempo-ish pace rather than vO2 max paces, with only 100m jog between them. So the purpose is not to sprint all-out and feel the burn in your lungs but to run just fast enough to work on leg speed/turnover at something that is closer to various plausible race paces than sprint intervals, taking just enough rest that you can do a decent number of intervals. I really didn't know what pace would be right so I think I started a bit slower than necessary, and also found that the whole thing went by in a flash and even after 12 intervals I felt like I could have kept going for at least four more reps, maybe more.
Tuesday 11/28: 3 easy. Basically a rest day. Feeling tired & lazy.
Wednesday 11/29: a.m. strength + p.m. 5 easy. Feeling a little better today!
Thursday 11/30: 2 warm up, 5 x 1200m/400m jog, 2 cool down = 8.8 total. Lol I was so tired this day that I seriously thought about taking another easy day or even a rest day and doing the workout on Friday instead. I even took a mid-day nap (which thankfully helped). When I finally did get started on the workout, I planned to do it at the track and drove all the way there only to realize I'd forgotten my watch. 🤦🏻♀️ So I got to drive back home again in rush hour traffic. There was no way I was driving BACK to the track at that point so I just did the workout on roads from home in the dark. 🙄
I haven't done many vO2 max workouts since starting back up in October and only pretty short intervals, so I was a bit nervous about this. I haven't felt like I've had much speed in the last year or so, so I wasn't sure what kind of pace would make sense. Like everything else lately, though, I'd planned to just do them by feel, and not worry about what the watch said at all. The first rep was uphill so I was happy to see 5:33 (7:20 pace) for that split. According to Garmin that equates to 7:15 pace when you take the grade into account, which is what I used to do mile repeats at pretty casually, so I thought that was a good sign.
After that, I found I was just able to run faster and faster with each rep, which was mostly a process of after each one of going, "Cool, that didn't kill me and was fairly manageable, let's try dialing it down a bit." After all those days in the spring when I tried so hard to run fast and simply could.not.move.my.legs to save my life, it was so refreshing to feel like, "Yeah; I could run faster, go go gadget legs."
When I did this workout regularly ca. 10-11 years ago, I pretty consistently did them in 5:00 (6:40 pace) which was my PR 5K pace so I did not expect to be able to be running anywhere close to that. And yet:
Considering how far I feel from "good" shape (and also how tired I was feeling today), anything under 7:00 pace (to say nothing of under 6:50) was definitely unexpected.
Friday 12/1: 4 easy. Then into the car and up to Tahoe!
Saturday 12/2: 13-15 long 8.77 easy. The easiest way to get a long run in in Tahoe is to run the ~7-8 miles from the Palisades village to Tahoe City and back. There's a sweet little protected bike path basically the whole way that is usually kept mostly plowed, and as long as it's not accumulating snow too quickly or doing an all-out blizzard, I'm typically fine running it in IceBugs if it's icy or regular waterproof trail shoes if it's not.
So that was my plan on Saturday, but around six miles or so I found myself really struggling to get air in and out and stopping every quarter mile or so to catch my breath. I started to think, "Wow this elevation is getting to me worse than usual!" But then it kept getting worse, until I realized, "Oh shit, this is an asthma attack, isn't it? Shiiiiit."
I turned around to head home, but the asthma kept getting worse and worse until I could only really walk. Which was a problem because it was like 35F and wet, and while I can run in much colder temps and stay pretty comfortable as long as I'm moving, this was going to become A Problem fairly quickly for my extremities. So I finally just called Don to come pick me up.
Sunday 12/3: Ski day! Technically. 😅 Palisades had two green runs open at the bottom and two blues up top, so we went up and did a few laps on the blues for the heck of it. The nice thing about season passes is that you can literally ski for like one hour and feel just fine about it. ⛷⛷⛷
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- The Wedding Scammer. Call me basic but I like a good true scam podcast. The creator of this one actually got scammed at a job by the antagonist at one point, but years later learns that that scam was far from this dude's first scammy rodeo! The series follows the crazy scam wedding/event/catering business this guy set up, culminating in the creator confronting said scammer. #eatingpopcorngif #iykyk
- You're Wrong About--Cattle Mutilations. I love You're Wrong About. Sometimes the topics are so absolutely random and the episodes are still unfailingly engulfing and hilarious. You have no idea how much you don't know about the history of cattle mutilations.
- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. The disinherited son of a local god tries to make sense of his life and early upbringing by his vengeful mother who, bitter and resentful of the god who left her and their child, raises her son with the goal of committing patricide. Fetter's travels lead him to investigating the Bright Doors, mysterious and ornate doors that regular doors sometimes turn into, which in turn leads to unexpected revelations about his life and family tree.
- Unexplainable (various episodes). One of my favorite science-y podcasts! Think of it as Radiolab Jr. Sometimes doing workouts trying to follow the plot of an audiobook is too much cognitive load so I just need to do podcasts instead. On Thursday's run I listened through all of the Lost Worlds series plus a couple other episodes.
This week I'm off to Southern California and then Dubai, so we'll see what kind of running I'm even able to get in!
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