Posts Tagged ‘progression runs’

I’m liking this week so far.  It started a little rough but that was due to a pretty strong weekend of running.

Monday was a 7mi recovery @9:10

Tuesday was my Billat 30-30s, averaged 8:23 for the run.  The warmup miles were quite slow because I was still in creaky mode, but the fast bit went without incident, or rather, a tiny incident.  My inner quad got a little ping about 1/2 through the fast bits, not enough to make me stop but enough that I felt it on…

Wednesday’s run, which I’d planned for 9, but cut down to 6 @ 8:58, figuring better to be safe with the tweak and besides, there’s no loss cutting 3mi from a recovery, yet I’d have been sad to compromise a “real” run.

Thursday, (a.k.a. this morning) I was in a bad mood when I woke up, which is funny since I realized from a post I made last week on Facebook that last Thursday sucked upon waking, too.  But thanks to the beauty of running, like last week, I snapped out of it once I hit the road.  My schedule called for a 13-miler with tempo but because I didn’t want to tempt the inner quad, I figured I’d do regular GA pace and hit the ramp a few times by the museum as a quasi hill run.

I ended up only doing the ramp once and went on the other side of the museum/river for the first few miles, just for a fun change.  As the first couple miles went down, I noticed my energy level was increasing.  First mile was 8:52 but with each passing mile, I progressively got faster till my last 2 were 7:35s, bringing the whole run to avg 8:05.  My legs felt great, my mind felt great, it was just…great!

Tomorrow is a day off and then Saturday, some MP miles and Sunday, a 20.  We’ll see, since Saturday says “heavy rains/wind” – if so, I’ll just run easy.  I’m  in that nebulous place between full effort and slacker mode.  I know I’m putting in some good runs but I’m also not pushing as much as I could which, depending on the day, has me either “eh, who cares? it’s enough” or “oh shit, I’m going to suck horribly in Boston”.  Generally the former wins, the latter seems to be limited to Thursday waking up.

Newsletter

Sent #3 out and must apologize for a lack of editing on the Swedish stair piece, I don’t generally write “experiment” two times in one sentence.  And also, I’m not so sure that is a guy in the Jazzercise video, so my apologies to the woman with the horrible haircut.

I had a fantastic run today and even broke some personal records.

Besides my first 14 days in a row, I ran my fastest 13-miler ever (8:26 avg. pace).  It was a progression run, last 4 miles averaged 8:04 (coupla 7:59s in there).

Lastly, you know how in the previous entry I said I was going to do 12, which would bring me a new mileage record of 59.25?  Well, I brazenly wrote that, thinking “I refuse to buckle under the pressure of making that 59.25 a 60, just to make it that beautiful, even, divisible by 10 number”.  Yeah, right.  New mileage record today: 60.25 (still uneven, but at least in the 6-0′s).

So today it’s Eagles vs. Cardinals (so exciting!) and we’re getting a big fat, greasy pizza (even more exciting!).  Then tomorrow I’m going to do a bona fide slow recovery run so that I can get some good intervals in on Tuesday.  Yeah, I’m continuing the “streak” though I’ll no longer be thinking of it as one, just me running until I feel like I need a break.

Beyond that?  Who knows.  At this moment, life is good and that’s all that matters.

Continuing my between-cycle search for out of the ordinary (for me, anyway) running entertainment, yesterday’s treat was a 7-mile Progression run.  Brad Hudson or Greg McMillan will tell you they’re a surefire way to get a little extra aerobic aerobic improvement out of an easy run without the need for recovery.  Plus, they’re real fun.

Here’s Mcmillan’s Progression Run page, if you’re interested.

A great byproduct of the zippier runs I’ve been up to lately is that they’re introducing me to potential marathon goals for next Fall.   When I trained for Steamtown, the only time I ever ran marathon pace was on the two MP runs Pfitzinger had in his plan.  That pretty much sucks, because if you’re feeling like crap that day or even for that matter, feeling amazing, two tries seems like a dinky sample for such a huge event.

Which is why I’m an official race-pace convert now (and this extends to all race distances).  Whether it occurs in the form of intervals, tempos, steady state or part of a long run, I’m all about rehearsing race pace as part of the training block.

So it occurred to me that my faster easy runs these days double as a kind of audition process for future marathon pace.  I mean, not really truly quite yet, because it’s way too early, but it’s pretty cool to be running 8:xx and think, “yeah, gimme 11 months and I could do this for 26.2″.

Back to reality and the calendar, Hudson’s Half plan was supposed to begin this coming Sunday.  However, because my mileage and workouts are already ahead of his basebuilding phase, I’m going to jump into his plan a bit later, continuing on my own for now, though including his progression runs and hill repeats in the interim.

It’s strange, doing a truncated plan before a goal race – I’m so used to having 16 weeks laid out for me – but I realize that’s a mental thing, it’s not like I won’t be training well these next few weeks – six weeks, actually.  His threshold runs don’t even begin till week 7, so in essence, the main Hudson contribution will amount to a 10-week plan.

Looks like Excel and I will be spending some quality time together as we figure out how best to fill in the blanks.  Good thing I love that stuff.