January 19th-25th Training

Monday: 10.6 miles (7:18); 6.3 miles (7:20)

Tuesday: 7 miles (6:59). Was going to do a light fartlek but my legs felt like cinder blocks and I was crawling on my first pre-workout strides; 10.7 miles with 4x10s hill sprints (7:02)

Wednesday: 12 miles with 10 miles medium. Averaged 5:39 pace for the 10 miles. Felt really smooth and controlled after a rusty first couple of miles. Splits ranged from 5:30 to 5:50; 7 miles (7:32)

Thursday: 9.7 miles (6:44); 6.9 miles (7:43)

Friday: 8 miles (6:47); 9 miles (6:25)

Saturday: 10 miles with 6x.30ish mile hill repeats (Four up, two down).  Eased into these, with the first two being somewhat easy and the last two being tough the last 1/4 or so.  I was planning on doing four downhills but the last half of the second downhill was really tough and I was huffing and puffing at the end, so I knew that was enough for the day.  Ran decently well and I like using this workout as an introduction to speed because I get plenty of recovery in between the hills and the downhills let the speed come a little bit easier, while also toughening up the quads.  Averaged 87.49 up and 80.41 down. 6.5 miles (7:01)

Sunday: 20 miles (6:14). Really good long run.  Felt smooth and controlled and averaged sub 6:00 the last five miles...best I've felt on a long run in a long time; 2.9 miles (8:16). The slowest I've run alone in a long time but I was just trotting and my legs felt fine.  At least it let me know it would be dumb to do squats afterwards (which was my initial plan)

Week Total: 127.1 miles. This may have been my #2 highest volume week of all time.  Other than Tuesday, my legs felt really good the entire week and my hunger to train is getting stronger. My hip is fine now, except my quad is still a little bit swollen on that leg for some reason.

I think with one more strong base week, I'll be ready for some more structured fast workouts.  My fitness is slowly coming along and I feel like I'm at least sub 67 half-marathon shape right now.  With five months to go, that's perfectly fine.