Monday Off- drove back from Cincinnati. Left about 4am actually made great time and could have snuck in a run on the home end in the late evening but I had made the decision to take an off day already and just went for a 2 mile walk to try and uncurl the body.
Tuesday AM road 10+ with Pat Rich around Topsfield, nice loop, hot day,1:07:28, did some light strides after.
Wednesday AM At Phillips, 3 mile warm up, drills, strides, 200m in 31, 600 jog. Then 4x800 meters run HARD and stupid, ie out very fast and rig up and die. This is to drive the latic acid as high as possible with each rep rather than run them as fast as you can. Basically I ran each of them like I would have in high school. Out in 30/31 for 200, there was a decent wind in the 2nd 200 so I'd be 64/65 at the 400 and then just a war from there to the finish. After each 800 I would take 2 minutes recovery and then do 4x10 hill sprints. My hill was at best 30m so I added on a bit of flat at the bottom and top, jog down recoveries after each hill repeat. After the last rep I would take 2 minutes before the next 800. This obviously included the jog back down the hill and over to the start on the track. I ran the 800's in 2:13.6, 2:14.0, 2:14.7, 2:15.0. After the last 2minute recovery I did 4x500m where I would run the first 200m in 33 then go straight into bounding the next 100m then I would TRY to run the last 200 meters in 33- I think the closest I came was low 34 on the last one. The bounding 100 took me about 25 seconds each time. I would take 4 minutes recovery with about 200 meters of walking after each. I did them in 1:34, 1:31, 1:29, 1:28. I was then completely running late so I did a 1k cool down. This is a base phase mas lass workout from Canova's stuff for 3k to 10k running. This is the first time I have done it and it was VERY intense. I was almost afraid to start the last 800 because it was getting so painful...
PM road 5 with Uta, too hot for her so we were slow, 36:47
Thursday AM road 10, 1:08:16, very sore and tired
PM road 5 with Uta, very sore still, 36:15
Friday AM road 10, 1:06:40, tired but not sore.
PM road 5 with Uta, 34:46, tired.
Saturday AM road 5 with Uta, 34:39
PM At Chelmsford rail trail, 3 warm up, drills, strides, 5x2miles- with 3 minutes of drills for recovery. The rail trail is very flat but it is sort of false flat uphill one way and false flat down hill on the other. Not enough so most people would notice but if you put a tennis ball down it would roll. Reps 1,3,5 were 'down'. Reps 2 and 4 were 'up'. I ran 10:11, 10:19, 10:04, 10:18, 10:00. This actually felt really good. 4.5 mile cool down- was doing 2 miles but toward the end I ran into Kara Haas and really wanted to see how she was progressing on a recent injury and so I ran with her. Now I had breakfast after the first run but because this was an early PM workout I hadn't had lunch. By the end of the extended cool down I was pretty well tuckered out as the whole thing was over 18 miles and drills burn a lot more energy than their mileage indicates. Plus that was 10 miles of work in 50:52.
Sunday AM road 10.1, 1:07:57.
PM road 5 with Uta, 35:13
Summary 95 or so miles for the week. Two very good workouts. After Rye harbor I couldn't help but be worried. I didn't have very high expectations but I thought my training had been moving in the right direction and I was very disappointed to run that poorly. As I have pointed out a number of times base work should improve your workouts much more than your racing but to be over 32 minutes was still pretty crushing. That starts to look like a poor tempo run rather than a race. If I had gone out hard and died I would have paid little or no mind to that as when you go out too hard it is impossible to gauge what you could have accomplished with smarter running other than to know you are not fit enough to go out at the pace you went out in. However I had run quite sensibly and still really struggled. I mentioned in last weeks blog that it sort of hit me on my tired warm up for the hill repeats that I felt anemic and that anemia could be a real good explanation for why a 32 minute 10k hurt that bad. I don't want to disparage a 32 minute 10k too much it is just that after college I have only run that slow a handful of times. Once in 2008 on super tough course with Anemia. Maybe once in '05 or '06 on the same very tough course with very tough heat as well. After that I ran like 40 minutes for a trail/mountain race in Vermont during mud season and I ran 32 mid at Lone Gull last fall off of some light jogging and yoga coming back from that stress fracture. All this is to say that since about 2004 even when I have run bad over 10k I have generally been able to salvage a 31. Anyway warming up for Saturday's workout I felt quite tired and it seemed like either I hadn't eaten enough or I was feeling anemic. I have been taking iron since Monday and been eating a good bit of red meat as well. As soon as I hit the first split on the rail trail at 1/5 of a mile in 5:00 pace and feeling good I knew I had been right about the iron being low. I felt great. In fact in the last quarter mile of the first 2 mile rep I was feeling so good I couldn't resist checking my heart rate, 118. Now I'm assuming it was up higher than that for much of the rep but even to settle down like that late in a rep I must have been pretty relaxed. I was still worried about the full workout. Often with longer aerobic workouts when my iron has been low and is just starting to come back I'll start the session feeling normal again and then somewhere midway the wheels just come off but today was great all the way through. I never really pushed, though I will admit my legs were tired on the last rep. This is really good news as I really want to slip under 31 at Cow Harbor in a 3 or 4 weeks and 32, even though it was solo, did not make that look to likely. This weeks workouts and the 15:10 solo a couple weeks ago line up with being ready to do that by the middle of next month so I'm happy that the poor time at Rye seems to have been a blip.
This week school starts up again so I have a weird schedule. I think I have an open house Tuesday night and I'm not going to be ready to workout again until Tuesday so I'm going to have to try and sneak in workout from school and try and track down a shower there before parents start arriving. I have also become quite inefficient with my time as summer went on and with the start of the school year I won't have anytime to waste if I'm going to get everything done so the first week is always a rough transition.
