End of Week Sixteen (2-22-08)

It’s Friday morning and the snow is falling. I was awake this morning and getting ready to leave for the Y when the phone rang at 5:30 to let us know that the kids would not have school today due to the weather. Fortunately, the Y was open.

This ends the first of my Speed weeks. Although, my current plan is as much about building mileage as it is about speed. I had 30 miles scheduled this week and completed them all. I had some good runs and some not so good runs.

I opened the Y Saturday morning at 7:00 AM and did a solid 6 miler. On Sunday, I wanted to get on the track for a Tempo Run. My plan was to warm up for a mile than do 5 hard miles at around an 8:15 – 8:25 pace. By the time I got the track, I had been working around the house (kid’s bathroom renovation) for several hours. It was also very windy and I could tell it would not be a particularly pleasant run. The fast potion of my run consisted of 3.5 miles at 8:24. With the wind and the fact that each ½ mile was faster than the previous one, I ended up being satisfied with the run.

When I was finished running and driving home, I had that feeling that comes with a real workout. It’s different than the achy feeling after a long run. It feels like your muscles are still working even though you are not moving. I would have liked to hold the fast pace for longer, but decided not to overdo my first real speed work.

During the rest of the week, I had a junk 3 miler and a junk 4 miler. In between this junk, I was very pleased with a faster than usual 6 miler on Tuesday.

This morning for my next bit of speed work, I planned a progressive run of 6 miles on the treadmill. My intention was to up the pace at certain intervals so that I would be running the last four miles at around an 8:15 pace. But I read an article yesterday about progressive runs and how the movement from a slower pace to a faster pace is best when you do so by feel as opposed to a prescribed interval. I thought the article was unnecessarily wordy and transcendental, but the essence still struck a cord. Go faster when you are comfortable at your current pace and have more to give. As a training run, you do yourself no real benefit to force a pace. And in the long run, you can end up going faster and certainly feeling better. So, from the window in front of my treadmill, I watched the plow trucks scraping up and down Baltimore Pike and pushed the buttons to go faster when it felt right. I started slow and ended at an 8:00 MPM pace. The overall blended pace of 8:40 wasn’t super fast, but I was getting faster throughout and held at a good tempo pace for at least the final 3 or 4 miles.

My overall pace for the week was faster than last week by 15 seconds/mile to 9:24. This is OK because I was also adding mileage, and most of that was slow easy running. I’m not doing as much fast running as I would have thought three months ago, but the need for more miles to support hard workouts has taken on more focus. Nevertheless, this is the time when I will be running harder and faster workouts to build on the endurance base that I have. Next week I am bumping overall mileage up to 34 with some more tempo work as well.

There are now five weeks until the race. I spent some time planning the final weeks and I realize that I will always be planning up to the end. The adjustments that have been made to the plan over the past couple weeks have been to generally add mileage. I ran six days this week and will do so for the next two weeks also. Currently I have my last Long Run (20 miles) planned for 3/8/08, which is two weeks from now. At that point I will be transitioning to my taper. I can’t wait for the taper.