April 6th-12th Training

Monday: 8 miles (6:54); 6.3 miles (7:05)

Tuesday: 5.3 miles (6:54); 10.1 miles (6:29)

Wednesday: 3.9 miles (6:50); 8.2 miles with track workout. This was an adventurous run. My plan was to warm-up a little over four miles on the greenway and then drive 20 minutes to a track I've never run on before. When I got to where I thought it was, I figured out it wasn't there. So after a frantic phone call and Googling, I was able to find it an hour later. Workout plan was 16x400m at sub 70 with 1:00 jog rest and 3:00 jog rest after four. Ran the first 4 in 68s with a 70, then two more 68s. On my 7th, I accidentally only ran 300m because I wasn't paying attention.  But after "seven" (I really thought it was eight), I was done.  The weather was cool on Sunday but for this one, it was 85 degrees with a dew point of 66.  I was spitting foam after the first one and was dying in the heat, even though the pace wasn't that bad.  I managed a very short cool-down and was drained the rest of the day (and even went to bed before 9pm, which I never do). The kick in the gut was that I started after the high school team was training on it and I was done while they were still doing work.

Thursday: 9.7 miles (7:01); 6.8 miles (7:16)

Friday: 10.1 mile with four miles of 30s fast, 2:30 moderate. I through this in because of the early exit on Wednesday. A lot of times, I like to run a fartlek of .15 on/.35 off. It's great for a tune-up, an off-season workout or when you're starting to introduce higher intensity work.  But I noticed that Brad Hudson's athletes do the 30s fast/2:30 moderate workout a lot, so I decided to give it a try.  I ended up averaging 5:25 pace for the whole thing with a fast pace of 4:11 and a moderate pace of 5:48.  On the fast portion, I felt pretty sloppy and a little wreckless...almost like when you were younger and going down a really steep hill on your bike, where your bike wobbles side-to-side some and you feel like you're going to crash.  The moderate part was tough for the first half of most of them but then I was able to recover by the time the next fast portion started.  I pushed what I thought was the last fast portion in sub 4:00 pace, but I did the math wrong and figured out I had one more left, so I ran under 4:00 pace again (which really hurt).

Fun workout but the intense pace was tougher than I thought it would be.  You definitely need to be in touch with fast work before doing this if you want to feel smooth.

Saturday: 9.2 miles (6:56); Skipped second run because I was on the road to Florida and relaxed some when I got there.

Sunday: 17.8 miles with Gulf Coast Half-Marathon in 1:11:57 (with a shoe-tie pit stop). My plan was to run just under 1:12 with a small progression in pace (5:40s to a little faster than MP at the end).  Weather was low 70s, windy and rainy for the first half.  Course was primarily out-and-back and I felt really sluggish running in the 5:40 range.  I was hoping the tailwind would give me more time on the way back, but I was running 5:30s with the same effort.  At the ten mile mark, I picked it up some and ran sub 5:15 pace the last 5k.  Would have liked to felt more smooth but it's been a busy weekend.

Week Total: 95.4 miles. Not a bad week.  I tried to cut it down a little bit since I jumped back into things relatively quickly after my injury.  I also had a lot of old main pains going on, so I figured a couple of skipped runs would be good.  Next week will hopefully be a solid week of training and then I'll relax a little bit for the marathon.