Wednesday’s Run
Yesterday I couldn’t get myself out of bed in time to get in my run before work so I ended up having to squeeze it in between work and mid-week Bible study. It was fairly hot, but the humidity was down just a bit. My schedule called for 6-miles at “easy” pace, so I decided to start from my house and do a 6-mile route through the streets of Bellevue. When I went to grab my Garmin I saw that the battery was dead, so I just took my basic Timex stopwatch instead.
I knew from the start that my legs felt good, but I really didn’t know what pace I was running without my GPS. The heat was pretty intense, but I maintained a steady pace and my legs felt good throughout the run. When I got back to the house my stopwatch read 48 minutes, 46.16 seconds. I used MapMyRun.com to confirm that my route was actually 6-miles, and it came out to 6.05. This translates to a pace of 8:04 per mile, which is quite a bit faster than my “easy” pace target of 9:05 to 8:26. This is actually even faster than my “long” run pace range of 8:05 to 8:25.
Not sure where this burst came from, but it was actually a big confidence boost after many slower runs in recent days.
Tonight’s Run
Tonight I met the JSRC track group at 6pm at Vanderbilt to complete my weekly “speed” workout. I did the week 5 “speed” workout prescribed in the Hansons Advanced Training Plan. This was 5 x 1000m with 400m recovery in-between each interval. This equates to 3-miles of intervals and 1.25-miles of recovery. Based on my goal marathon time of 3:15, the target splits for this workout are 4:00. While, this is the goal, the Hanson brothers really emphasize not exceeding your target pace, and even make their athletes do sets of push-ups for every second they exceed their goal.
When I got to the track I noticed that the gates protecting lanes 1-3 were still closed, and our coach John said that they needed to stay that way tonight (not sure why). This meant that I had to track my distance using my Garmin, which is always an iffy proposition. I did this by using .62-miles for my intervals and .25-miles for my recovery. I know that my watch does not keep up very well these days, so my intervals were probably not terribly accurate. This is a bit frustrating as it doesn’t tell me where I am compared to my split targets. Of course, with the high humidity, it’s hard to measure what my goal splits should be anyway.
With that being said, I did the best that I could, and my legs actually felt pretty good throughout. Afternoon showers lowered the temperatures into the mid 80s, though it did leave behind some nasty humidity. This was much nicer than the “feels like” temperature of 98º that we had at track last Thursday night. I ended up taking much shorter breaks for fluid than I did last week, and knocked out all 5 intervals in a pretty short timeframe.
With 2-miles of warmup, 6 x 100m stride outs, and 1/2-mile of cool down I ended up with 7.3-miles of work for the night. I’ll take it.
In addition to the these runs, I also got in the following cross-training exercises today:
Chest
- Standard Pushups (30 reps)
- Military Pushups (17 reps)
- Wide Pushups (40 reps)
- Decline Pushups (32 reps)
- Diamond Pushups (10 reps)
Total = 129 reps
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Workout VINYL: Lazaretto (ULTRA LP) by Jack White |
“I dare you to train for a marathon, and not have it change your life.”
-Susan Sidoriak