Big Miles + Radical Rest (Eugene Half Week 4 of 8)

Like most weeks, lately, this one was stressful and exhausting. Maybe not as much as some weeks. But still, I spent so much of the time feeling tired, both in terms of feeling fatigued (runs are hard, hard to motivate off the couch to accomplish basic tasks such as feeding myself) and sleepy (not always getting enough sleep, fighting off daytime naps).

By the time I finished Friday's 7-mile easy run, I was already thinking forward to Sunday's nontrivial long run workout (15 miles including 3 x 2 mile reps at half marathon effort) and strategizing about how I was going to make sure I got the most out of it. Thankfully, this past weekend was one of those rare and beautiful ones where I had absolutely no concrete commitments beyond keeping myself & the cats alive and doing the bare minimum necessary to keep our living space some basic level of functional/not gross.

The strategy I settled on was radical rest, which included the following pillars:

• After running on Friday evening, feed & hydrate self/cats ➡️ sit on couch & watch TV ➡️ go to bed early.
• Saturday ➡️ sleep in as much as possible ➡️ feed & hydrate self/cats ➡️ mostly sit on couch, feed/hydrate as necessary / carb load like a mother ➡️ go to bed early.
• Saturday ➡️ sleep in as much as possible ➡️ hydrate/consume moar carbs (& feed cats) ➡️ coffee ➡️ friggin' *crush* this long run workout.

Now, this *mostly* went to plan, though I cannot honestly say there were *no* deviations:

• Friday went absolutely to plan ✅
• Alas I wasn't able to sleep in that much on Saturday, and then also realized there was a serious lack of groceries in the house, so I *did* go out shopping briefly, then came home and made a batch of carrot cake muffins (see: "carb load like a mother" / "consume moar carbs") which due to some drama with my oven and stand mixer was sliiiightly more stressful than it needed to be.

Carrot cake muffin with lemon cream cheese frosting 😋

• Unfortunately sometime during the shopping/baking, I developed a low-grade headache that insisted on hanging out for like ten hours. 👎
• HOWEVER: I did fall asleep on the couch for a solid three hours before the cats woke me up for dinner around 6:00pm.
• I did manage to make myself a fairly healthy & carby dinner.
• Soon after, a neighborhood stray started messing with my cats through the screen door, resulting in the kind of cat shrieking that makes you think someone might be dead, so I spent about five minutes nearly having a stroke while I tried to locate both cats. (I did, they were both still inside and fine, just a bit puffed up and shaken.) This did not help with my headache. 🤣😭
• Soon after I remembered, "Oh right, headaches are a thing you can take medicine for, let's maybe do that." 🤦🏻‍♀️
• Went to bed early ✅
• Slept in Sunday until 10:00 ✅
• Ate two carrot cake muffins, then played around on my phone in bed until 11:00, then went back to sleep ✅
• Cats woke me up around 1:00pm for lunch. Two more muffins and a latte later, I was out the door to demolish this run!

And what, you may reasonably ask, was the result of all this radical rest?

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, FRIEND.

This is the highest recovery number I have EVER seen in 15 months of using this thing (though I did not know it until after the run, since I didn't want to see a low number and psyche myself out).

Not shockingly, perhaps, I felt GREAT on this run. I can't remember the last time "easy" effort felt *this* easy, just rolling along, no care for hills or anything. My plan was to run easy miles the long way 'round to the track (~6.5 miles), then do the first two HM pace intervals on the concrete upper track, and start back towards home with the last one, which would leave me about a two-mile easy cool down. I honestly felt like I blinked and I was in the park, and then blinked again and I was at the track.

Now, when I have been doing shorter "HM pace/effort" intervals, I know sometimes I have been perhaps a *little* dishonest and pushed it a bit faster than is really defensible. Why? Because some days I am more of an optimistic than a realist and also because it's just fun and some days I have no discipline. The nice thing about longer intervals like this is that it forces you to get serious and really stick to an effort you can maintain for a while without starting to push into LT territory. If you get too cocky or try to bluff your way through it, your body will let you know. You can't really fake six miles of HM pace without starting to redline a bit. (At least, I can't.)

So, my plan was to start conservatively: Shoot for 7:50 pace for the first interval; if that goes well, then try 7:45 for the second; and if all systems are still go, 7:40 for the last interval. (I honestly do not think that faster than that is realistic right now for an entire 13.1 miles unless some kind of miracle occurs.) 

I also had to remind myself, though, that when we say "half marathon effort" in a workout, we're not talking about, like, the first two or three miles where it's not too bad; we're talking more about how that pace starts to feel towards the middle of the race, when it's starting to become less comfortable and take more effort (but isn't yet awful). So I kind of told myself, "Let's think about this as, like, miles 6-7ish."

With that mindset, my first interval splits were 7:43 & 7:39. I think the first one really was right in the right wheelhouse effort-wise; I kept thinking, "You can slow it down just a bit, just a bit, just a bit," but I didn't feel like I was running too hard and my legs and lungs were both pretty happy sitting at that slightly quicker pace, so 🤷🏻‍♀️. I didn't feel like I particularly sped up in the second mile, but apparently I did, just a bit.

It was pretty windy up on the outer track, so for the second set, I went down to the real track and ran in the outside lane. Starting it out, it felt significantly easier to keep up the same pace, but around the end of the first mile (another 7:43) I really started to feel the effort in my legs and for the second mile mostly just kept trying to keep my turnover up, though I apparently overshot it once again (7:36).

The last interval felt harder right off the bat, but not, like, way way harder; certainly not as hard as it feels trying to keep up HM pace in the last two miles of a race. I definitely found myself putting in more effort but was still able to stay in the same area pace-wise without pushing into that higher LT-ish gear. After the first mile (7:33), I said, "OK now you can pretend it's the end of the race. BUT BUT BUT still do NOT push it into that LT zone." So I really did just let my legs go as fast as they wanted, as long as I didn't feel like I was starting to breath significantly harder. I know that stretch is definitely a bit downhill and that I had a little bit of tailwind, but even so, I did not expect to see 7:18. I never felt like I was breathing any harder than I had been and did not make any attempt to shift into a higher gear, so that was really encouraging at the end of six miles of solid race pace work.

The big question, of course, is: How do I translate this radical rest/recovery approach to race weekend???? Especially when it's an "away" race??? I don't have it 100% worked out yet (especially since Eugene starts at 7:00am, lololol) but I am going to think on it and see what kind of plan I can cobble together.

In case you missed it:

Eugene Half Week 1
Eugene Half Week 2
Eugene Half Week 3

 ~*~*~ 🦆🦆 Eugene Half Marathon Week 4 of 8 🦆🦆 ~*~*~

Grand Total: 47.5 miles

🐌 Easy: 39.5 miles
🏃🏻‍♀️ Moderate: 4 miles
🐎 Fast: 4 miles

⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 83.2% vs. 16.8%. 

Blue = daily strain, red/yellow/green = daily recovery

Monday 3/25: a.m. strength

Tuesday 3/26: 6 easy. Another Tuesday when I didn't sleep well on Monday and also just felt too sore and beat up from lifting to feel like I could do a speed workout justice, so I punted it to Wednesday.

Wednesday 3/27: 3 warm up, 6 x (4:00 @ LT pace / 2:00 jog), 3 cool down = 10.5 total. I still felt kind of fatigued but sucked it up. The nice thing is that four minutes is just not very long so you can kind of just keep pushing yourself and stick your fingers in your metaphorical ears and go LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU while your body whines about how unpleasant tempo pace is. Now I am just guessing about what my actual LT pace is right now and going mostly by feel, but especially after Sunday's surprisingly good fast finish 5 miles, some of these intervals felt to me like they landed a bit on the slow side--7:23, 7:28, 7:18, 7:15, 7:25, 7:20 when I think at this level of effort I would have expected to see more like 7:15-7:20 across the board. But, hey, it's a workout, I am mostly just here to be uncomfortable, and that at least was definitely accomplished. 

Thursday 3/28: 9 easy. Easy in terms of effort, but legs were definitely still tired from yesterday and by the end of this run they were glad to not be moving anymore. (Also OOOOOPS I only realized after the fact that I got the days swapped & I was supposed to do 7 easy on Thursday & 9 on Friday. Oh well!)

Friday 3/29: 7 easy. One of those rainy, windy days on tired noodle legs where it still somehow feels like such a joy to be out there. 😊

Down by the docks on a gray, moody day

Saturday 3/30: Radical rest, and VERY glad to have it (cat hijinks & all). 😅

Sunday 3 warm up, 3/31: 5.5 warm up, 3 x (2 @ HMP / 3:00 jog), 3 cool down = 15 total.

A tasty post-run recovery meal of barley, leeks, and asparagus

(not pictured = a leftover piece of herb-crusted salmon, gotta get those prots)

🎧In my ears this week:🎧

• Nobody Asked Us with Des & Kara: The Space Between. Always love a good episode with these ladies. 
• End of Story by A.J. Finn. Near the end of his life, the famous mystery/thriller writer Sebastien Trap invites fellow writer Nikki Hunter to stay for the last months of his life and write his autobiography. In addition to his much-loved books, Trap is perhaps best known for the fact that his wife and young son appear to have disappeared without a trace on New Year's Eve 1999. Some think Sebastien himself is responsible while others spin all kinds of much wilder conspiracy theories. Nikki soon finds herself enmeshed in the family's drama, and when someone else close to Sebastien suffers a tragic end, the stakes suddenly feel drastically higher. Another winner by A.J. Finn! 
• Dayswork by Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel. During the endless days of the pandemic, a writer works on a book about Herman Melville while her husband patiently listens to her ramblings. Enjoyable as an audiobook, but reading a bit more about it afterward, I think this is one I want to go back and read in hard copy, because it sounds like the poet partner of the pair (Habel) did a lot of poetic-type structural stuff with the story in the text that you miss out on in the audiobook.
• First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston. Our protagonist, Evie Porter, works for a mysterious Mr. Smith, taking on fake identities and carrying out various sketchy tasks at his behest. In her current somewhat longer-term assignment in Louisiana, she has managed to meet, bewitch, and shack up with Seemingly Perfect Southern Gentleman Ryan Summer. She doesn't yet know what she's supposed to do for Mr. Smith, but in the meantime simply keeps bewitching away and enjoying the pretty sweet life she's got going with Ryan, actually. But then a new lady shows up in town bearing more than a passing resemblance to Evie--and using Evie's actual, literal, government name & identity as her own. Now Evie (not really Evie) has to figure out what's up, while also trying to remember that this whole deal with Ryan is not actually real. 
• Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera. Five years ago, Lucy Chase left her small-town Texas home with basically everyone there believing that she murdered her best friend Savannah after a mutual friend's wedding. While there wasn't enough evidence to charge Lucy, she's been rather useless in terms of truly clearing her name since she has no memory of the night, most likely due to a traumatic brain injury she suffered during whatever went down. But now a popular podcaster is dragging Savannah's murder and Lucy's possible involvement back into the public eye, and Lucy soon finds herself on her way back home, ostensibly to celebrate her grandmother's 80th birthday, but also to maybe a little bit see what can be done about figuring out the truth, for better or worse.
• The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill. Theodosia Benton has finally accepted that, in spite of her grandfather's wishes (and financial support), she actually does not want to be a lawyer and instead wants to be a writer. When Theo leaves Australia and arrives on her older brother Gus's doorstep in Lawrence, Kansas, Gus takes her in and does his best to support her as she pursues her new dream. Theo soon meets a well-known writer who becomes her mentor, but things go south when she finds him brutally murdered in his home. Theo and Gus soon find themselves investigating conspiracy theories and dodging murder accusations.