Hello! Here we are just a few days from the Johnny 10 and I am feeling particularly wise and sophisticated, having just completed my 43rd circuit around the sun. I spent the first part of the week frantically trying to meet work deadlines & then the last part chilling in Tahoe and blessing folk there with my hard-earned wisdom and life experience. Too busy skiing to take pictures so please enjoy these shots from a year ago:
~*~*~ 🌁 🌁 John Frank Memorial 10 Miler Week 3 of 4 🌁 🌁 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 38.85 miles
🐌 Easy: 25.51 miles
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 9 miles
🐎 Fast: 4.34 miles
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 65.7% vs. 34.3%.
Wednesday 2/21: 2.5 warm up, 7 x (1K / 400m jog), 2.5 cool down = 10.85 total. I woke up feeling much better on Wednesday but was still feeling a bit nervous about this workout because I'd been having some tightness in my hamstrings and some mild threatening-to-cramp sensations in my right calf which in the past have sometimes presaged calf/high achilles strains. Easy running has been fine but I was kind of worried about what would happen if I tried to run faster. But happy to report I got the workout done and all was well!
I am still guessing a bit at HM and 10K pace (having not raced either recently) but I decided to try to run the first K at ~7:45ish (so ~4:48 for the K) and then see how it felt to ratchet down the pace by about 5 seconds per mile each time (so the target times were 4:48, 4:45, 4:42, 4:39, 4:36, 4:33, 4:30). This actually felt pretty easy and was actually kind of a fun game, trying to get as close to the target time with each interval. The result was this extremely aesthetically pleasing Strava graph:
Thursday 2/22: 6 easy. I am usually pretty consistent about giving myself close to 24 hours between runs, but due to the fact that we were leaving for Tahoe mid-day, I needed to squeeze this one in closer to 18 hours after yesterday's workout, which you wouldn't think, maybe, makes a huge difference, but I certainly felt it!
Friday 2/23: Ski day + happy birthday to me! 🎁🎈🎊🥂🎂
Saturday 2/24: Abandoned ski day + 4 "easy". OMG apparently I destroyed my ski legs skiing bumps on Friday because I couldn't ski for *shit* on Saturday. Rather than risk injuring myself I quit early & got my "easy" 4 miler done, though nothing is really ever "easy" when you're running in the mountains but your ass is trained at sea level.
Usually when I am planning to run in Tahoe I bring both my Icebugs as well as a pair of Gortex trail shoes, because sometimes you just don't know for sure what the sidewalk conditions will be. In the hustle & bustle of packing, though, I forgot the regular trail shoes this time and only brought the Icebugs, which meant that of course the weather would be on the warmer, dryer side at the base. You can run in Icebugs on regular concrete, and I did on Saturday because I didn't have a choice, but it isn't super comfortable, and while four miles was basically fine, I was not excited to repeat the experience with the 10 mile workout on Sunday. (I also think it's not great for the studs & might shorten their lifespan.)
So, after finishing the run, I drove down to Tahoe City and bought myself a pair of trail shoes. There was not tons of selection this time of year, but I ended up leaving with a pair of Topo Pursuits, which felt good and had the nice, wide, foot-shaped toe box that I often like better (especially in trail shoes). Usually I size up to an 8, but the closest they had was a 7.5, which actually felt *almost* too big actually?
.jpg)
Sunday 2/25: Ski 1/2 day + 10 mile progression run. Skiing legs recovered after a day mostly off! Spent the morning getting in some runs at Palisades, then headed down to the Truckee River Bike Trail to attempt the assigned workout. The thing about trying to do "workouts" in Tahoe is that even "easy" runs usually feel kind of hard, and for some reason I really struggle to keep the effort level & my heart rate in a place that *actually* qualifies as easy. So I figured I'd just start this run off "easy," and see if increasing the effort level was in the cards in any way. 😅
Actually, though, I didn't find it too hard to inch the effort up just a bit after a couple of miles, & was surprised to see I was inching my way down past 9:00 pace, to 8:55, then 8:50, & so on, in a way that was obviously harder than it would have been at sea level but doable and seemed sustainable. I felt like I reached the five mile mark surprisingly quickly & then just ran the rest of it like a tempo run, with the last mile at about as hard an effort as I could muster (which was still only 7:59 pace for that whole mile. Altitude is hilarious. 😆) But hey, the point was to get in a hard effort, and according to Strava and Whoop, it was. So we're going to call it done and done.
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. We cut back and forth between seventeen-year-old Beth in 1992, whose life seems to be spiraling out of control between her abusive father, neglectful mother, and increasingly morally ambiguous friends, and middle-aged Tess in 2022, who along with her compatriots “The Daughters of Harriet” has been using highly sophisticated, billions-of-years-old time machines to travel into the past to try to effect social change. But now a shitty group of men from the future seem to be trying to destroy the machines in order to keep women in a subservient role. An interesting premise, but the mediocre-to-poor writing and the sense of an “agenda” made this one a bit of a slog for me.
- The Decagon House Mysteries by Yukito Ayatsuji. Sort of a modern Japanese play on the Agatha Christie classic And Then There Were None. Six members of a college mystery writers club decide to spend a weeklong retreat at the remote and infamous ten-sided “Decagon House,” where a year before, a series of grisly murders took place. Honestly, under the circumstances–the island is accessible only by one small inlet, and has no electricity or phone service–these plucky kiddos probably should have known better than to tempt fate. They soon begin to suspect that they too may be the targets of a killer, and sure enough, the murders soon begin. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, a fellow club member investigates the earlier murders and their possible connection to the mystery writers club.
- I Invited Her In by Adele Parks. When Mel’s old college friend-turned-glamorous-minor-TV-star Abi finds herself at loose ends thanks to her cheating productor husband, Mel doesn’t hesitate to invite her to stay as long as she likes–nevermind that they haven’t spoken in 18 years, when 19-year-old Mel got pregnant after a one-night-stand and ended up dropping out of school. Now their lives have massively diverged, with Mel happily married and raising her 17-year-old son along with the two younger girls from her marriage while Abi pursued her glamorous TV career in LA with her fancy producer husband. Things start to feel a bit off with Abi, though, and soon her presence is affecting Mel’s family life in ways she never imagined.
No comments:
Post a Comment