last week was a down week in mileage but what I did was take that extra energy and climb more and it left me feeling about the same amount of tired than if I was still running a 75 mile week
I did a hard run last Sunday and didn't feel recovered in time to do another workout on Wednesday. Then I got a little bit of a cold on Friday but it was such a baby cold.
I like training and I really enjoy doing workouts but I realized that now that it's the month of the 10 miler I've been putting a lot of pressure on each workout to really show that I'm ready to accomplish my goals. I think I've fallen into a bit of a mental trap where I'm afraid of the workouts because if they don't go great and tell me I'm absolutely ready then I'll feel like I've failed. Which is not what a workout is for. A workout is just a stimulus to increase fitness. It can provide information on how a race would go but that's a much more anxiety inducing way of looking at it. Anyway, yesterday I did 8 steady miles at Keene and I did a good job of focusing on getting a good effort and not worrying too much about what it means.
I'm enjoying doing 6 to 8 mile tempo/threshold runs at a moderately hard effort. It's how I did a lot of my training in college and it's funny how things repeat because back then I thought it wasn't very serious training and it was just what our team did when we met up and wanted to push the pace and that real runners were doing formal workouts and things. Recently though the running world has become infatuated with the idea of threshold training and accumulating a high volume of moderately hard running. And so here I am once again doing the same thing.
Anyway, since September of 2022 I've built back up to the point where I'm doing these runs about as well as I ever did them in college. Yesterday on a loop with rolling hills I managed to average 5:50 pace and feel fairly in control. I'm confident I can get that down to 5:40 pace and maybe in a year feel that way at 5:30 pace. If I could do that then I would be extremely confident in races. That would be 'best shape of my life' conditions. And I don't think I'm too far off.
Anyway, last Fall I averaged about 65 miles per week with 3 workouts of threshold/sub-6 miles per week. Then from December until now I bumped my weekly mileage up to 75 and focused on 2 workouts with one of them being a longer run of 15 to 17 miles. March will be one more week of 75 miles then two weeks of lower mileage leading into the 10 miler on the 25th. The last week of March will basically be a total rest week with very little running and then another rest week when I go to Costa Rica for the first week of April. I'm looking forward to that rest.
April and May will be focused on getting ready for the downhill mile at the start of June and then the summer track meets in July. I'll go back to running 60 to 65 miles per week and run a VO2max workout on the track about every 10 days. something like
Mon: 10 miles easy
Tuesday: 10 miles easy
Wednesday: 6x800 fast with equal rest OR 5 to 6 miles at Riverview steady--aiming to run 5:40 pace or better
Thursday: 10 miles easy
Friday: 8x200 or 8x300 on the track
Saturday: off
Sunday: 8x1000 fast with equal rest OR a hard long run (14-15 miles) at a fun hard long run spot
And that brings me up to the summer when camp starts. And we'll figure that out from there.
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