Before I begin today’s festivities, I have a little tech rave for the Garmin folks, so skip this paragraph if you don’t use one.  SportTracks users: check out this incredible weather plugin, found thanks to a RW poster in the Gear forum.  It gives the weather at the start and end of your run as well as an average.  Ditto with wind (even calculates headwind/tailwind), wind chill and a few other great tidbits to help log your run.

So I took Friday off, did a short 6 with 8 strides Saturday, and then yesterday had a fantastic 9-miler. The weather was gorgeous – 45 degrees, and I guess the day off with the previous day’s strides energized me, because my usual training pace (about 8:50/mi) went on holiday.  I was moving along comfortably at  8:23s, 8:20s, feeling as if it was a normal everyday run.

What makes it even more gratifying is to look back one year ago, to November 18th when I ran the Philly Half Marathon.  My race pace that day was 8:28 and I was sucking air bigtime.   That’s progress.

Backtracking to my last entry,  I have an interesting addition regarding my mention of the supposed “10 days for speedwork to create its adaptions”.  Jim posted a comment questioning it so I started looking for evidence and, save for a passing mention in Glover’s book, couldn’t find anything, just memories of times I’d read it.  So I posed the question in the RW Training forum.

Thanks to one member, whose opinion I respect on all things physiological, I think it just may be an old wives tale, as he said there’s no way to test such a single session and he’s asked numerous sources about the subject.  Well good!  I like doing a light speed session on race week, so now I won’t have to feel guilty about it or think I’m just appeasing my brain…it probably does help!

So today’s the day for said speed session.  I’ll be getting to it in about an hour because it’s going to be stupidly warm today, low 60s, so no time to waste.  I’ll probably be doing 6 x 1/4 mile at 5K pace.  It was between that or Daniels’ race week 4×1200 at threshold pace but in the end, race pace sounds more enticing.

Lastly, on the subject of speed workouts, I wonder if my regularity on doing intervals and tempos weekly for the last few weeks is the reason my thighs are getting bigger.  I haven’t gained any weight, but damn, my jeans are getting pretty tight around that area.  I don’t even mind it really, they look good (and Nick keeps telling me so) but it is interesting that the body keeps changing.  Maybe now I can use them as a weapon, ala Bladerunner.

I’ll close here with a couple songs that contributed to my wonderful run yesterday, one of which is a free download for December.   Keane’s The Lovers Are Losing is gorgeous (as usual, disregard plotless video, enjoy beautiful song) and the freebie is Let It Rain by Living Things – great chorus.  Just right-click the download link to “save as” then go buy a gel with the money you saved.

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