Not much in the way of running to post about for this week.
After getting an antibiotic for strep throat on sunday, I went out monday for an easy run around my development. It was anything but easy. It was as if my legs forgot how to run. Running felt awkward and landing on each foot felt hard and abrupt. This was after taking 4 days completely off and it was like I no longer had any coordination.
Being someone who obsesses over how many miles I’ve run, I’m always ridiculously paranoid about how much fitness I’ll lose if I take anything more than 2 days off. We work so hard to gain fitness, but it seem so transient and is gone almost the minute we can no longer continue.
However, I’m sure in this case it’s due more to the fact I wasn’t as fully recovered from being sick as I thought I was. When you feel so horrible for a while, you forget how it feels to be healthy.
In anycase, I wanted to run a little over an hour to get out 8 miles, but wound up making a conscious decision to cut it short and not push it past 5 miles. That was Monday.
Tuesday, I was back at work, and did 8.2 miles on the treadmill in 64minutes. It was an odd pace for me; between my easy and marathon pace. I wanted to run a little harder than easy but marathon wasnt something I could keep for the full time.
Wednesday is typically a scheduled day off and I decided to keep it that way despite missing so much last week. Frankly, I actually still felt the run from the day before and needed the break.
Thursday, I started feeling a bit better, but not good enough for my scheduled tempo. So I started the treadmill at marathon pace and increased the speed 0.1 mph every 10 minutes for the full hour. 9mph would be my pace for cruise intervals, and I went from 8.2 to 8.7, but without rest intervals so I counted it as a tempo anyway considering the effort.
Friday, today, I ran 2 miles at marathon pace and decided to cut back to easy pace for the rest of the hour covering 7.7miles.
What a shitty week in terms of performance. Thankfully its warming up to 45 degrees tomorrow, so I’m hoping to get out for a long run and enjoy the temperature while it lasts; and hopefully most of the snow will melt.
Next weekend is the Manhattan half. I was planning on doing some hard training in preparation last week before getting sick – didn’t happen. This week was just a struggle. I’m not happy I didn’t get an opportunity to do anything in the way of Vo2 max intervals, or anything faster than tempo pace and now it’s too late. It’s a shame because for a while I thought my training was going well enough for a decent performance and now its hard to know where I am. For now, I’m just glad this half is not a goal race.
