Mon: 7 km easy
Tue: 14 km lower aerobic
Wed: 10 km (Hadd Test) + 7 km easy
Thur: 12.7 km lower aerobic (evening)
Fri: (morning): 6 km easy//9 km upper aerobic
Sat: 18 km trail run in about 2 hours (uphill out, downhill return)
Sun: 26 km @ 5:19/km average
Looking over that list, it would be tempting to say that it must have involved a lot of slow running. But the thing is, that lower aerobic heart rate isn't that slow these days, as demonstrated by the Hadd test on Wednesday night. Each run designated "lower aerobic" was about 4:40 to 4:50/km average. The second half of the run on Friday morning was mostly at sub 4:30/km. And the Hadd test itself involved three rather fast 2-km reps.
A friend talked me into a trail run on Saturday morning. It was pretty steep terrain and the day was promising to be a scorcher, but once we got a couple of hundred meters up, the terrain leveled out and the air became noticeably cooler. Just nice easy running. I surged up some of the hills, but also walked a lot. Afterwards we cooled off in the river and ate watermelon (and drank about a gallon of assorted soft drinks).
Surprisingly, this morning my legs felt absolutely no ill effects from the trail run whatsoever. And then the run just peeled off at a steady pace. I felt comfortable rolling along in the low 5:00/km despite the 29 degrees temperature. But running with others for a while I slowed considerably below that. Then off again. I was waiting for the old familiar hip flexor fatigue to hit, but it never really came. I finished feeling only pleasantly fatigued and could have easily continued except...I seem to have picked up an infection in the downstairs waterworks area. It was quite uncomfortable during much of the run, so I was happy to finish when I did. I am scheduled to see a urologist tomorrow as a follow-up to what I can only think was a related problem from the week before. But that problem aside, with the passive help of Mike's Mystery Coach and Hadd (via Ewen), I seem to have stumbled on a really nicely balanced mix of frequency x intensity that is making me stronger without wearing me out. It is a precarious balance though, and another week of walking on a knife edge starts tomorrow.
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4 comments:
congratulations, another week with great efforts!
let me cite: `damn, it will be a low mileage week now' [Steve Lacey, July 30] after that you made 94k and 110k. well, if you call that low mileage ;-)
That trail run sounds refreshing.
Thanks for the Mystery Coach link - I'll read through those posts when I get a chance.
I hope the knife-edge walking goes well. No such problem for me thus far. I plan to try some upper aerobic runs of 15-16k to see if there's any loss of pace at those HRs so that could stress things a little the following day.
Wow, that's a lot of running you've been doing. Interesting stuff. I really admire the structured training and experiments you are doing. I'm just not motivated to stick to anything myself :)
I noticed your 2.3k 'long' run on Monday. I hope things settle, 'down there', so the marathon prep isn't interrupted too much.
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