Weekly Summary 04/14/14-04/20/14
Mileage: ~45; Elevation: ~4,400′
Monday PM: ~5k uphill recovery walk with ~1400′ gain. My legs felt surprisingly good for barely 48 hours after an ultra. This felt just like a recovery effort should, leaving me refreshed after finishing my walk and core workout.
Tuesday AM: ~3.5M uphill run. 6x400meter uphill efforts, with ~550′ of gain. Not a bad effort here either.
Tuesday PM: Half hour recovery run around the neighborhood, followed by an upper body workout.
Wednesday PM: 6.8M easy run around the Winrock Loop followed by my lower body plyometric routine.
Thursday AM: 7.7M speedwork run. 5x1M @ 7:15 pace with 3:45 recoveries. I’d ideally like to do less recovery time after each repeat, but it really helps my mental math to just go to the nearest minute. My splits were good for this though, with times of 7:08, 7:14, 7:10, 7:10 and 7:14. For as much as I’d prefer to be running slow in the mountains compared to fast on the track, these workouts are really turning in to one of the highlights of my week. I’m definitely feeling some adaptations resulting from these hard morning efforts.
Thursday PM: 5k shakeout run along my normal route from home, followed by a core workout.
Friday PM: Easy half hour run with Megan and the dogs, followed by an upper body workout.
Saturday AM: Total blah run. The first time all week my legs really felt unrecovered from the previous week’s run. I had planned 16 miles, but felt totally flat and sluggish, so I chopped it by 40% for a 9.6M run with ~1,000′ of elevation gain. I know that in the long run it makes way more sense for me to take it easy on days like this in order to save my legs for peak weeks, but it is still a mental struggle.
Sunday PM: Beautiful Spring weather in the foothills. I decided on a fairly short run again today, so I took Megan on a lollipop route in the Bear Canyon foothills area and followed it with my plyometric workout. It was a nice, easy effort after yesterday’s awful run and really reinforced how correct my decision was not to force myself to do a longer-than-necessary workout.