Before I get started, thanks Rich for providing a little bit of context for Ken's and Jeff's stellar performances. Your personal ups and downs are well chronicled; sounds like you might be on the uptick....finger's crossed.
Mo'pak, thanks for getting the week off. Nice week!
runn, welcome to the thread. I hope that you find some useful insights and good fellowship. There are a few here who have exercise-induced asthma issues....I guess it's not that uncommon.
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Week 43
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It was a more complicated week than I thought it would be, especially since it was spring break for us. But we took a mini-break in the middle of the week and headed over to Natural Bridge State Park for two nights...beautiful vistas and rock formations. This along with the adjacent Red River Gorge are Kentucky's best natural attractions. We also spent an afternoon and traveled over to West Liberty, a town that was the epicenter for the tornadic wrath that ripped through the Midwest a few week's back. Words cannot describe the utter devastation to the town. Simply overwhelming, as not a single building or tree in the entire downtown region was left standing. What are the odds of two tornadoes striking the same town merely days apart? Many blessings upon them as they try to rebuild their lives in the wake of this natural tragedy.
For my running week, I managed about 46 miles on 7 days of running. I'm on a mini-streak now, having run everyday since Feb. 14th...woohoo! My weekly log reads as such:
Sun: 10.3 with 2 tempo portions: 2.4@6:20 pace, 1.9@6:05 pace.
Mon: 6.1 easy
Tue: 6.5 w/ 1.25 in 7:08 (5:42 pace)
Wed: 3.8 easy, but hilly + a lot of up and down hiking.
Thu: 6 easy
Fri: 4.2 w 3x400m@3k race pace (tune-up for Saturday)
Sat: 6.1 very easy + 3k race in 10:26
Notes:
i) Sunday's tempos were broken up, mostly because a) I was late for group run, so I ran pretty hard to get there, and b) nobody wanted to tempo with me, so I ran with them for a while, then ran the back part of our 5 mile loop hard by myself.
ii) Tuesday's hard 1.25 was meant to get me up to 5k race pace. I wasn't prepared to do a full workout, but I knew I wouldn't get a workout later in the week due to our mini-break and a decision to jump into Saturday's Shamrock Shuffle.
iii) The Shamrock Shuffle (benefiting Habitat for Humanity) was a good rust buster for me; was figuring 10:40 for sure, 10:30 realistically, and 10:20 was my hope. Reflecting on what I learned from the race: a) I should warm-up more for these short races; it took me a good 800-1000m before I felt my legs under me, but my pace was even, b) I have no kick; I battled a few HS kids and overtook them with about 800m to go only to have them storm past me again with about 400m to go...after which I had nothing, and c) I need to lose some weight; after the race and subsequent 5+ miles of easy running, I weighed myself at 162 lbs!!! And post runs are when I'm my lightest! So I've actually gained significant weight in the past two weeks. The race time translates to about a 18:00-18:05 5k time, so the few extra pounds certainly was evidenced, as I thought I was in about 17:50 shape a few weeks back. For perspective, I was 155-156 lbs (pre-run weight) a year and half ago when I was running my best, and I've commented before that I think optimally I should be more like 148. Am I willing to cut back on the treats??? Decisions, decisions.
All-in-all though, it was a good week.
Alan Bennet piqued my interest in training intensity and duration and ramping up the training with his comments about choosing either quantity or quality for a given week. It just has me thinking about all the different ways we can imagine getting the variety of paces that we know are necessary in order to improve both our speed and endurance. I can imagine that one could hit all the paces every day, every few days, every week, or even every few weeks. I can imagine building quantity synchronously with quality or in a complementary fashion (as Alan B suggested.) I guess that I still follow my old-school model in which I increase quantity and quality over the course of several weeks, and then back off every few weeks in mileage and intensity as recovery. But I can see that there are probably many ways to achieve the desired affects. Furthermore, as we age, does the best modality also change? I think that most of us have noticed that it does take longer to recoup from a hard speed workout than it used to. So should we change the way we do our hard stuff? Rtype, for example, is choosing a completely different approach that emphasizes almost purely on quality, but takes care not to do so much as to risk injury. Meanwhile, Ed Whitlock's remarkable success (OK, so he's a bit of an anomaly, to be sure) results from tons (or is that tonnes?) of mileage that uses frequent racing as the source of speed work. Lot's of options, I suppose, but certainly food for thought. OK, that's enough rambling, but hopefully it's a launch-point for some discussion.
Hope you all are doing well. Weather sure was nice around here this week. BTW-our friend who is traveling cross-country (I mentioned him a couple week's back) is hunkered down, caught in the dust storms in Northern Arizona, hopefully, he'll get out of there soon enough.
Finally, I gotta give a shout-out to my teams. Go Wildcats! Go Badgers! My allegiances are torn. :-)