And here we are, just one week to go, all over but the tapering. This month has been a little bit of zero to ninety in some ways, and though it's gone really well and I feel fitter than I have in *quite* some time, I am also very, very tired and SUPER excited for a week of mostly four-mileish runs with non-easy work limited to some short strides here & there. It's that feeling of all the miles starting to pile up, being able to execute longer harder workouts pretty well but then feeling *suuuuuper* super fatigued at most other moments. The overall mileage and workout load of the last few weeks is definitely starting to accumulate and I am feeling it. 😂
Most of the time when my assignment for the day has a range (ie 4-6 easy or 6-8 easy or 12-14 long), I will opt for the higher number because why not. But when I feel the way I have this week, I am instead doing e v e r y t h i n g I can to make easy days as easy as they can possibly be, no shame whatsoever. This week on easy days I have been doing the minimum mileage, and taking things as comfortably as I feel like, regardless of what that means for pace. Because on the big workout / long run days, I want to be able to fully execute and get the full benefit, and if I am out here adding extra easy miles when I'm already tired and pushing the pace because I'm self-conscious about what shows up on Strava, then I might not be able to do that.
People are always saying "Don't leave your race in a workout" but something people do not say often enough in my opinion is "Don't leave your workouts in easy days." I want to be able to run truly hard on hard days, and the only way I can do that (especially as I round the corner towards 43!) is to take the easy days truly super duper easy.
~*~*~ 🎡 🎡 Kaiser Permanente Half Week 12 of 13 🎡 🎡 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 45.6 miles
🐌 Easy: 31 miles
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 9 miles
🐎 Fast: 4.6 mile
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 69.5% vs. 30.5%.
Monday 1/22: 2 wu, 6 x (1k@10k effort/2:00 jog), 2 cd = 8.6 total. Managed to pep the legs up for some fastish Ks. In retrospect I did not gauge the effort super well & probably should have done these a bit slower (since I am prettttty certain I cannot run a 10K at 7:09-7:14 pace right now lol). It's just they felt so good and fun for the first 2-3! 😅 But then my cool down miles were 🐢🐢🐢 so 🤷🏻♀️ oh well.
Wednesday 1/24: 6 easy. In one of those odd paradoxes of bodies and running, Wednesday's easy run felt *much* much better and just overall smoother and, if you'd asked me, I'd have said I was running faster than Tuesday. But apparently on average no! 😂 Which is completely fine.
In other news, when I finally installed this nifty shoe rack, it forced me to go through the closet where a bunch of my shoes were, & lo & behold I rediscovered a few pairs I'd kind of lost track of (or been wondering what happened to them lol). One of those was this pair of Boston 2020 special edition Altra Escalante Racers that I got on super clearance (for obvious reasons). I wasn't sure it was the right choice since they are thinner-soled, zero-drop shoes and my feet and ankles have been feeling a bit banged up from the miles. But they were actually super comfy! So kind of fun to rediscover them.
Thursday 1/25: 2 warm up, 2 x (2M @ HM pace/3:00 min jog + 1M @ HM+ pace/3:00 min jog), 2 cool down = 11 total. So usually I look at my Whoop recovery number in the morning (it shows it right after you do your daily journal entry) but I have decided that on race days or days when I need to do a longer or harder effort, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by looking. Because if it's fairly high, then great. But if it's unsettling low, it just makes it easier for this little creeping voice of doubt to sneak in and sabotage things. (Like "OoooOOOooh, you're in the low yellow/red, probably things are going to feel really hard and the paces are going to be super slow, better just mentally prepare yourself!") I'm not talking about a day where I just honestly feel off or bad and I know a longer/harder effort is a bad idea; it's those days where I feel more or less average and Whoop is like "Heyyyy according to The Algorithm, you aren't exactly at your physical best today," which could end up predicting something or not.
But I have been doing this Whoop thing long enough now that I know the things that tend to have the biggest impact on my recovery score, which are a) poor sleep, b) jet lag/otherwise messed up schedule, and c) mental/emotional stress. So if I have a night like Wednesday where I am feeling stressed about work things, struggle to get to sleep, then wake up unusually early and can't get back to sleep (thanks to the work stress), I kind of know what Whoop is going to tell me.
So, I did not look on Thursday before the run. It was a big key workout, really my last before Kaiser Half, and I wanted to just take my best shot at it without any preconceived ideas about how it would feel or whether it would be good or not. I figured I would just do it by effort, and if it was slow, then oh well, it was slow.
But I'm happy to report that it actually felt really good! I went into it thinking, "Okay, the main thing you need to do is not run the intervals too hard," which I sort of mentally translated to 8:00 pace max for the HM pace miles and maybe 7:30 pace max for the HM+ miles. And that actually felt really doable! Like, "comfortable" is probably overstating it, but it didn't seem outrageous to think I could run somewhere close to that for 13 miles. I mean who knows but maybe. Somehow I ran the last fast mile at 7:26 which really felt much easier than I think it should have at that point. Not easy, but also definitely not in the redlining range at all. So that was all very encouraging???? And I'm glad I did not know beforehand that my recovery was apparently at 42%. 👀
Friday 1/26: 4 easy. Mostly a quick little jog to pick up some grocery staples. Nine times out of ten I feel like a short, "easy" run the day after a longer, harder run feels actually super hard and crappy, but this one felt...super easy and comfortable? Super slow (and I'm sure it would have felt much worse if I'd been trying to run fast) but still kind of just effortless, the way I always think recovery runs should feel (but almost never do). 😅
Saturday 1/27: 10-12 w/ 3 miles fast finish. The vibe when I started this run was, "I feel totally fine just toodling along at a moderately-fatigued-easy pace but am really NOT looking forward to speeding up to ANY degree." Sometimes my coach writes a run that says "x miles, if you are feeling good you can pick up in the last y miles" and other times it's just a straight "x miles with last y faster". I was pretty sure this was the latter but after like four miles I actually went, "Maybe it was the first one? Maybe those last three fast miles are optional? You know what, better stop and check, just to be sure." And then when I confirmed it was the latter (i.e., not optional, at least not optional any more than *any* run on the plan is optional)... "Ugh, fine." 🙄
Actually what the plan literally said was "last 3 miles @ increased pace," so there was definitely part of my brain going "Well I've been hovering around ~9:15-9:45ish so technically even like 9:00 pace is an increase, HA." But really I just thought, "You know what, just open it up a little bit, do a little smooth coasting at a pace that feels like a little push but still comfortable, and that will probably be fine."
So that's what I did, and imagine my surprise when the first split was 7:45 lol. I thought I would try to relax a bit for the second mile but that split then turned out to be 7:20 (!). That last mile to home gets a bit hard to run too fast on as there are lots of lights and pedestrian traffic on narrow sidewalks, so the final split was a very reasonable 7:58 😅. Anyway, I'd been thinking maybe I'd run these miles around 8:30ish or so, and given how I'd been feeling up to that point, if you'd told me "a little smooth coasting at a place that feels like a little push but still possible" would be sub-8:00 and that one of the miles would be 7:20 I absolutely would not have believed you, not even a little bit.
Sunday 1/28: Rest. Is...is my body actually getting used to running six days in a row? Is that what's happening here?? 🤯
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. In 1990s Mexico City, talented but marginalized sound editor Montserrat and her best friend & washed-up soap star Tristán are muddling through. Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, who believes he's cursed due to a film he worked on decades ago never being finished. Urueta strikes a deal with Montserrat and Tristán: If they help him finish dubbing the last unfinished scene and lift the curse, he'll do an interview about the magical film that could help Montserrat out financially. But soon eerie things start happening, and the pair begin to wonder if Urueta is right about the curse after all.
- Two Dead Wives by Adele Parks. During the summer 2020 British lockdown, that police are investigating what they assume to be a murder–except that there’s no body. Alas the missing/presumed dead woman is not the most sympathetic victim, as she’s recently been revealed as a bigamist who has been carrying on two completely separate relationships, unbeknownst to her two husbands, for several years now. Simultaneously, we follow the story of a middle-aged woman quarantining with her father in a seaside village while she recovers from brain surgery and is also working to recover her missing memory. Over the course of the book we learn how the two different stories are connected and what really happened to the missing woman.
- Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer. In this relatively quick nonfiction read, the author asks the eternal question, "Is it possible to ethically consume the art of problematic artists? And if so, how?" Unfortunately it didn't seem to me that she had anything new or particularly revelatory to say on the subject and the book felt more like a journal reflection of personal musings (often on topics only tangentially related to the topic) than a particularly nuanced and insightful take on an age-old question.
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