One last (kinda) normal(ish) week... (Kaiser Half Week 4 of 13)

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%

Training Log: (Super) Dead Super Shoes + Crisis Averted!

Before we get into this week's training log, a moment of silence please for this amazing (in some respects) pair of New Balance RC Elites that I super enjoyed running in for a little over a year. As you can see I really pushed the envelope in this these things but I think April 3's SacTown 10 was destined to be their last hurrah, and we're calling it at a whopping 216.27 miles according to my nerdy little spreadsheet. I am pretty sure when you can actually see and touch the actual carbon plate that you should not be running in a pair of shoes anymore regardless of how much they cost.

These shoes were a pandemic-era Christmas gift from my mom but I am pretty sure they cost $225 which puts us at about $1.04 per mile. I have never calculated this ratio for a running shoe before but once you get up into the > $200 super shoe category, it really just becomes irresistible.

I've had opportunities this last year to run in a few different carbon plate distance shoes (not the Nike ones, I absolutely refuse on principle) and I have a lot to say about them, so look for a future blog post going into more detail. But for now, just know that I loved these shoes *so much* in terms of feel and performance but was also super bummed at how non-durable they turned out to be (lesson learned).

ANYHOO, let us move on to this week's training log.

"Race" Report: Across the Bay 12K

I've been aware of this race in its various incarnations for the last ten years or so and always had it in the back of my mind, but never actually run it. It starts in Sausalito on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, then runs over the Bridge to finish on the north side of SF. The race has been around in some form or another since the early 80s so it's sort of a classic, but any year that I considered it, something didn't work out. Either the timing was wrong, or I wasn't into the distance, or was out of town, or just had other things I wanted to run.

This year as I put together my summer of short, fast racing, it popped up again, and I added it to my short of list of nearby events that might be fun if the timing worked out. When I decided on Wharf to Wharf as my peak race, though, my coach suggested that I not try to race Across the Bay just two weeks before because it was unlikely that I'd be fully recovered & ready to race 6 miles just two weeks later. But if I wanted to do it as a tempo workout, that was fine.

I'd gone back and forth about it because it's hard to spend money on a race, especially a local one with a route you could run any time, just to do a workout. On the other hand, the tempo workout I'd have on tap for that week was one I know I struggle with (3 x 2 miles at HM pace / 2:00 jog) and I thought that maybe the race atmosphere would keep me motivated and honest (and maybe make it more bearable). At the last minute Represent Running Race Ambassador Erin gave me a comp code she wasn't going to use, and I figured, "What the heck. Let's do this." (That would also mean getting the run out of the way early in the day, which would be nice since we had plans to spend most of the day at a birthday barbecue.)

Last Workout Before Statuto Race + Race Preview!

Last night was my last workout before Sunday's Statuto Race on the Embarcadero, an 8K put on by the SF Italian Athletic Club going back nearly 100 years. (The first running was 1919, but there was one year during World War II that it wasn't run.) I have never run an 8K, but something small and cheap and right in town in the 5-10K range seemed like a nice summer racing kickoff. It's new distance for me but one I'm kind of excited about, and I can't deny feeling just a bit giddy to race again as I put this last workout away.

The workout was nothing fancy, just some mile repeats at race-ish pace. RunCoach is predicting a 35:06 / 7:03 pace finish for me, but I think I can do a little better than that. Originally, I'd planned to run this race as more of a workout than an all-out race, but after a pretty decent month of training, I decided, what the hell. Let's just race and see how my fitness is. My target race (Wharf to Wharf 6-miler) is still nearly two months out, so there's no risk of blowing that race, and nothing else between now and then that I care all that much about. Also if you're going to get a shiny new automatic PR, why not make it a good one, amirite?

8K is 4.97 miles, close to halfway between 5K & 10K, which is sort of interesting in terms of trying to come up with a goal time/pace. Back in December I ran a strong-for-me 5K at 6:51 pace, even though I had not been training that much or that seriously, but it's been a very, very long time since I ran a fair 10K course in good shape. (I ran Shamrock Shuffle 10K in March in 43:05, though I think we can all agree that that course was closer to 6 miles than 10K, so maybe ~7:10-11 pace.) I think it's going to be a bit of a guess no matter what, but since my training for the last month has been going well, I don't think it's unreasonable to shoot for 7:00 pace for five miles, which gives a nice round 35:00 total.

Tonight's workout was 4 mile repeats this time with 90 second jog recoveries, so I basically went into it viewing it as a sort of 8K race simulator (just 4.36 miles instead of 5--4 hard miles plus the recovery intervals). Since I'm shooting for 7:00 miles on Sunday so I tried to stay pretty comfortably in that wheelhouse, with interval times of 7:01, 7:01, 7:00, and 6:57. I think that's the fastest set of mile repeats I've ever done, so I just hope I didn't push it too hard & am able to recover well enough by Sunday!

'A' Race Time Predictions!!

If you've been following the drama the last few months you might recall that I've been having some annoying issues with my left side, from my lower back/SI joint, through my hamstring, all the way down to the plantar fasciitis (which is chronic) in my foot. It was sort of at its worst a week before OktobeRun but a week off magically healed me enough to get through the race at a pretty okay pace, though the hamstring was pretty unhappy after.

I had some forced rest (thanks, travel & weather!) after that, which probably ended up being for the best because in spite of basically no training between OktobeRun and Oakland Turkey Trot, I had a significantly faster race.

Riding the high of that race, I told myself, OK but for real now! Three & a half weeks til Santa Run! That is totally enough time to get serious about this shite & shave a few more seconds off this beezie.

And, I DID have a couple of good weeks. But then this past week/weekend I got called to NY at the last minute, & if there is anything that will eff with my training plans, it's these short coast-to-coast trips where the time zone gremlins just completely destroy whatever free time/decent sleep you thought you had happening in your life. I won't even bother doing a training log for that week, since "training" consisted of

1) Tuesday 12/4 => 3.5 warm up, 6 x 200m / 200m jog, 2 miles @ aerobic threshold, 6 x 200m / 200m jog, 3.5 cool down = 12 total

2) Thursday 12/6 => spend the whole day flying/sitting in NYC traffic & arrive in so much winter boot-induced foot pain that the 7 easy on the schedule was never going to happen even IF I'd arrived at a decent hour.

3) Friday 12/7 => Work a full day on 3 hours of sleep, come back to hotel & crash

4) Saturday 12/8 => Work another full day on maybe 4 hours of sleep, just barely rally for 2 warm up, 3 x 1 mile @ HM pace, 2 cool down = 7.2 total.

5) Sunday 12/9 => Get up at 4:30am Eastern/1:30am Pacific to catch a 7:00am plane home, land at 10am Pacific, & immediately come home & bake cookies for a party. (Again, I could barely walk this day, so there was no running; just 21 straight hours of mostly regrettable consciousness.)

It was really this last run on Saturday that was the turning point for me.

Boston Marathon Week 11 of 18: How Not to Plan Your Training Week

So, at least for now, it seems like I've gotten back to a normal training load, just in time to turn 37 last Friday. I decided against the Saturday 10K, for a lot of reasons, including 1) running 6+ miles at 10K race pace is REALLY DIFFERENT than a run-of-the-mill speed or tempo workout, and I don't want to risk my hip relapsing so soon after it's started to feel normal again; 2) I reallllly need to prioritize long runs right now given my distinct lack of them as of late, and racing on Saturday makes a Sunday long run potentially miserable or a bad idea or both (if not impossible); 3) $60 is pretty pricey for a 10K I haven't even really been training for; but mostly 4) I wanted to go out for a fun dinner on my birthday Friday night without having to worry about what I'm eating or drinking and going to bed early and getting up at the butt crack of dawn or feeling like crap at the starting line.

So. I'll race something else later. Right now we are seven weeks out from Boston and it seems prudent to keep one's eye on the prize so to speak.

As for week 11? Well, on the face of things, it looks like, "Hey, wow, a normal-looking marathon training load! Woohoo!" And there's some truth there. My hip has felt 100% completely fine (because you can bet your booty I wouldn't be running this mileage otherwise), and it DOES feel super good to complete all the workouts and finish the full long run and even hit all the paces. (I've even been doing the strength work!) So, in a lot of ways, #winning.

But there was also a little comedy of errors going on this week in terms of how I ended up running all those miles & workouts. So let us talk about how, in an ideal world, one would perhaps NOT structure their training week!

Michigan.

This past Monday I logged into my RunCoach account to find this waiting for me:

My RunCoach speed workouts for the most part are usually pretty simple, x number of x00 meters @ x:xx pace with x:xx jogs, or sometimes two of those with 30-40 minutes at marathon pace sandwiched in between. In any case, pretty easy to glance at, quickly commit to memory, & execute without too much thought. We don't tend to do "ladders" or "pyramids" other fanciness very often, so this one threw me off a bit.

MP miles, back sprain, lobster

While I'm still sort of in "pre-season," I've been trying to get to the gym to lift every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Sadly, this has not been a good week for it. We got back from LA on Sunday around 6 and I immediately set out on a long run, meaning I wasn't done until around 9. I got to bed late and was more exhausted than usual when my alarm went off at 6am, so I figured it probably made more sense to sleep for another hour rather than drag myself to the gym.

Then on Friday morning, I woke up with my lower back feeling like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. I don't remember doing anything to it Thursday and it was perfectly fine when I went to bed, but when I got up I found myself completely unable to bend more than about 30°forward. Thankfully it was a good day for working from home!

My massage guy is 30 miles away in Palo Alto & usually takes at least a couple of weeks to book, so I was thankful that I managed to get a same-day sports massage with a reputable place here in the city. In addition to a bunch of stuff I already know (I live on the outside edges of my feet, have a super effed-up right hip/groin situation, a petrified left ankle, & generally insanely tight leg muscles all around), the therapist told me that it looked like I had basically sprained my right SI joint, i.e. threw my back out, probably via running (because seriously what else).

It was much improved after the massage though not perfect, and he said I could expect it to take another few days to a week to get back to normal. In the mean time, he said I could do whatever I wanted as long as I could tolerate the discomfort & it was pretty unlikely I would make it worse. Running didn't seem to bother it that much so I went ahead with my Friday pace run as planned -- 2 warm up, 50:00 @ marathon pace, 2 cool down.

This workout was not god-awful (I did complete the whole thing at a completely within-expectations pace & heart rate, pausing only for traffic lights in the Park + 1 water stop), but it was definitely MUCH harder than the 11.4 mile speed workout three days prior. (It was also on rolling concrete instead of the track, so there is also that.)

Part of me really wonders what would happen if I swapped Track Tuesdays with F-pace Fridays. Those speed days don't really feel that hard at the time, but I think they really do have a lingering effect in terms of general fatigue.

At 7:30 I was sitting on the couch in sweats & wet hair when Don texted me like "Let's go out for a nice dinner!" and I kind of snorted because the idea of getting a Friday dinner reservation in SF anywhere good when it's already dinner time is hilarious, but I dutifully fired up OpenTable & SeatMe to see what was available. In a completely random & bizarre turn of events, I snatched up an 8:30 res at Nightbird, a new restaurant that I remembered reading about recently. I didn't remember much about the food except that it was supposed to be really good & people were super excited about it opening.

Well, it turned out it was only their second night, so I have no idea how such a prime reservation for a highly anticipated opening was just sitting there an hour beforehand! The food was an absolutely brilliant five-course pre fixe (plus a couple of snacks) with wine pairing.

Lobster with grilled hearts of palm, chantarelles, & black truffle.
This is the only picture I managed to take because too busy eating.

They also had some really interesting & tasty cocktails. So Bay Area peeps, if you're looking for a splurgy, amazing dinner in the city, check it out!