Hey friends! Here is what last week’s training looked like!
Monday – Easy: 8 miles (8:58 pace)
Monday was my birthday! For several years, I had a birthday tradition of running my age in miles on my birthday. I did this for 26, 30, 31, 32, and 33. Last year, I finally wised up and started a new tradition of running the number of miles that my age adds up to. Last year was 7 miles for 34 and this year I ran 8 miles for 35. Such a better idea! This whole older and wiser thing is really nice.
Tuesday – Easy: 6 miles (9:14 pace)
I got up and trudged through six driveway miles Tuesday morning. I was definitely feeling a bit more run down than usual and by the end of the day, I realized it was because I was coming down with a cold. It’s a little bit unnerving to come down with the sniffles in the midst of this pandemic because every single symptom seemingly points to corona. Thankfully, I never got a fever or anything like that.
Wednesday – REST DAY!
In the spirit of being older and wiser, I decided to take a day completely off from running on Wednesday to give my body time to recover. I typically would’ve powered through since I only had a minor cold, but with no races on the calendar and no other good reason to attempt to power though, I decided that rest would be the best thing I could do for myself.
Thursday – Easy: 6.5 miles (9:06 pace)
The day off definitely did me some good and I felt much better on Thursday. I ended up missing one of my quality days this week. My coach told me to not worry about trying to make that up in any sort of way and to just run an hour easy on Thursday and Friday. That’s exactly what I did! I wanted to make sure that I didn’t overdo it.
Friday – Easy: 6.5 miles (9:02 pace)
Friday’s run was almost an exact repeat of Thursday, but just a few seconds per mile faster.
Saturday – Quality: 2 mi. WU, 3 X [4, 3, 2, 1 min.], 2 mi. CD
I had a big workout scheduled for Saturday morning. I had every intention of bagging it if I got into it and didn’t feel good. Thankfully I felt good and was able to complete the workout as prescribed. The workout called for a two mile warm up, three sets of four minutes at marathon pace, three minutes at threshold pace, two minutes at interval pace and one minute at repetition pace and a two mile cool down. There was two minutes of rest in between the four minutes, three minutes, two minutes and one minute intervals as well.
If you aren’t familiar with the VDOT paces (marathon, threshold, interval and repetition), basically this was four minutes at marathon pace, three minutes at 10k pace, two minutes at 5k pace and one minute a one mile pace. I can’t recall a workout that I have done in the past with this many different paces. I really, really enjoyed this one! The marathon and threshold minutes were not super challenging, but I was definitely working on the interval and repetition minutes.
The idea was to increase the effort as I worked down the ladder. My goal paces were 6:09 for the minutes at marathon, 5:50 for the minutes at threshold, 5:22 for the minutes at interval and 5:10 for the minutes at repetition. The first set was 6:01, 5:46, 5:22, 5:10. The second set was 6:01, 5:45, 5:17, 5:09. The third set was 5:53, 5:43, 5:20, 5:05. I was super duper pleased with how this went, because I was able to dial the paces in consistently across a wide range of paces. Woo to the hoo!
Sunday – Easy: 10 miles (9:33 pace)
I did an easy ten miles on Sunday morning. This run was originally supposed to be a tad longer, but my workout the day before was over twelve miles in total. Ten miles on Sunday seemed like plenty to me (and such a nice round number to boot :)). I felt fine, but had no desire to run any further than I did.
Total – 49.5 miles
Side note: If I had known how close I was going to be to 50 miles for the week, I likely would’ve run another half mile to even that out, but oh well … so close!
In other non-running specific, yet beneficial to running news, I managed to get in 20 minutes of planking and 75 minutes of Pilates throughout the week and I got drills and strides done twice as well.
That’s it for now. Have a great week!