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Week 213
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Salutations, 50+ers! Kind of a late start on this 4th of July weekend. The mileage was down even a little more this week as I wanted to be in as good a position to run well as possible for the 10k yesterday. Total mileage only came about 23+ miles with log reading as such:
Sun: 5.0 easy (8:10 pace)
Mon: Off (tired again)
Tue: 4.0 tune-up track workout w/8 laps of 1/2 lap on (~43s), 1/2 lap off (~53s).
Wed: 4.0 easyish (7:39 pace)
Thu: off (storms and such, missed my opportunity)
Fri: 3.5 miles w/4x1 min. surges
Sat: 7.0 w/10k race@41:02
Most of the week was unremarkable. No killer workouts, and even the race was what I expected (almost to a tee.) Tuesday's track workout was mostly just to practice race pace and surging; probably did them about 2s too fast. Friday, was an easy run with race-pace surges (the surges were about 6:30 pace.)
I'm not going to do a full race report this year, as it was a pretty unremarkable race for me. Frankly, it felt more like a hard tempo run than a race (don't get me wrong, I was pretty spent by the end), as I couldn't ever get myself into a good groove. We'd had a ton of rain the past few days, so the ground and the air are fully saturated. The 67 degree start temperature felt comfortable when standing still, but with the dewpoint also at 67 degrees, we were at 100% humidity, and there was no evaporation going on. You can add about 7 degrees for not having any evaporative cooling compared to a dry day, which made it a bit on the warm side for a 10k. My pacing was pretty even (623,627,645,639,653,626,127), considering miles 3 and 5 had inclines (as such, mile 4 should have been a little faster.) According to SCgal's temp/humidity Excel spreadsheet she linked to (
http://www.mprunning.com/attachments/File/MPR_Calculator.xlsx
), under ideal conditions this would have been right at 40:00, so I think that what I stated last week came out spot on. Last year, when the conditions were ideal (upper 50's, low humidity), I ran 40:01; I'll mark this as a good sign, especially since I'm about 4 lbs heavier than I was last year.
Ended up 2nd in the 55-59 age-group. We were both ahead of the 50-54 winners on this day. It's a good benchmark, now I need to identify my biggest issues...and general strength is one of them. Going to spend the next few months (and maybe from here on out) focusing on rebuilding some strength, adding back squats and lunges that I've been neglecting, and getting back to doing hills (I know I keep saying this, but it's time to get serious about it.)
OK. That's all I've got for this extended holiday weekend. Would love to hear some good 4th of July race reports!
All the Best!