Summary for week ending Sunday, April 10, 2016:
Number of workouts: 6
Total miles run: 56.53
Average miles per run: 9.42
Miles in April: 75.62
Miles in 2016: 670.05
Spent most of the week on the treadmill. I doubled on Monday, with the evening run outside in relatively nice temperatures but a stiff wind ruining it. Had a business trip mid-week so did shy of 7 on Wednesday morning inside; could not force myself to get up early at the hotel to get in a few miles Thursday morning after a pretty late night of business socializing and then watching a terrible, late Flyers game. Two rest days last week, had to squeeze in miles on Friday and Saturday. Friday looked nice out, with a lot of lovely sun, but the temperature wasn't exactly nice and the damn wind was definitely not nice, so I voluntarily chose to run 10 miles on the treadmill instead. It felt pretty good after ~36 hr of rest. Saturday arrived with wind and snow-slash-rain and I was certainly not going to run in that if I had another option; fired the Landice back up for another ten that didn't feel quite as good as Friday but still pretty reasonable as I forced the pace to stay easy (average HR ~140).
Legs already had a little more than 35 miles in them when I started today's long workout: 2 mi E + 2(10 min T) + 10 mi E + 15 min T + 2 mi E. These workouts with a mix of relatively lengthy T and a long easy interval in the middle are tough but effective. It was not as windy as it has been recently but it was still windier than I'd like; I am heartily sick of fighting significant headwinds during my T workouts. The sun is strong and pretty warm, but the air was borderline chilly and the wind ruined it again. However, I surprised myself by feeling really good in the first two T intervals in spite of the stretches of wind in my face -- I didn't look at the pace, but ran only by effort. T effort was faster than it has been, which pleased me. 7:02 average for the first 10 min, 6:53 average for the second 10 min. The 10 miles in the middle were a bit of a drag and my legs felt on autopilot and not at all responsive. I did not expect the last 15 min T to feel very good at all, and I told myself I'd get to 10 minutes and see how it felt; I could quit at 10 if my legs were crumbling or struggling. The wind kind of felt like it had picked up a bit, but that might have been my frustrated imagination. It seemed to take a while to wind up from easy pace to T effort and my legs were heavy, but I was again surprised at how they responded to my orders to run hard -- 7:10 pace did not feel like I was overreaching on effort, and when I got to 10 minutes I just kept on through the whole 15. It was actually a bit hard to knock off down to easy again afterward, almost as though it would have felt better to keep running harder. I wanted to get my HR back down to near 140 for the last easy two miles, but at 145 bpm I did not feel that I could run any slower. My legs were on autopilot again and they would not listen when I tried to bump them down; it was 8:45 pace and, ok, fine. I was done at a little more than 19.5 miles. It's the longest workout so far this year, certainly the toughest, and I'm pretty happy with myself for getting it done with good pace and good effort. I think that race really did my system good and I think I am reaping benefits from making sure I run the easy runs easy.
Learning, learning. Next week a medium-long T workout and a 19 mile long run on Sunday with 15 mi at MP. I'm getting into the meatiest part of the training cycle. Now, if only the weather could warm up a little bit and the wind could knock it the heck off. I don't want to see snow again until November at least. Seriously! I drove up to a Flyers game Saturday afternoon in a veritable blizzard of huge, heavy, wet snow. It was very nearly a white-out. It was ridiculous. Let's be done with that, April.
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