Another month; no setbacks

Today, it was the mother of all windy days.  Unfortunately, it was also a 5 mile tempo run (7 miles total).  The wind made it truly a brutal workout, with what should have been "comfortably hard" paces feeling close to interval effort.  I ended up adjusting my expectations for pace slightly.  I had set out to do the 5 miles at 7:26 per mile, but I could see early on that 7:26 would be pushing it.

In the end I did some faster and some slower, but I averaged almost exactly 7:30 per mile.  There was one slower mile that was completely into the wind and uphill for most of it, but I compensated on my last mile to make up the difference.  In the end, I set a PR for an 8k by 10 seconds.  I arrived at this conclusion by taking my time of 37:31 for 5 miles and and trimming the extra .03 miles for a time of 37:18 when I would've crossed the finish line. Not bad for not giving a kick at the end and not truly exhausting myself like I would in a race condition (though I was closer to full effort than I would have liked).

This was an interval session of 5x(800m in 3:20 (6:40 pace), 400m recovery jog).  I ended up doing all the intervals slightly fast, which I probably should try to prevent, but I'd rather go too fast than too slow.  I ended up doing most of them in 3:17 or 3:18, which might not seem like a big difference, but I'm starting to do some of my running at a reasonably fast speed, so differences of a couple seconds are starting to make significant differences.

As for the running streak, I think I'll start taking Sundays off from running and just doing P90X Plyometrics soon, but I'm not sure I'm willing to give up the streak I've started yet.  It now sits at 55 consecutive days of running a total of 287 miles for an average of 5.2 miles per day.

Another good week of training

Well, the streak of good training continues.  So far, in my experience, the importance of rest days is overstated. I fully agree that you need to take it easy for most of your runs, but I do not believe that you need to take days entirely off, at least not when you're as slow as I am.  The past month I've seen the most drastic improvements of my running, and I've just been following the philosophy of running a minimum of 5k a day, with quality days on Tues and Thurs and a 90+ minute run on Saturday (though it'll be Sunday this week).

The streak began on August 6th, and since then I have run 35 consecutive days and 186 miles for an average of 5.3 miles per day.  I have seen my comfortably Easy pace drop from 9:50 to 9:10, my Tempo from 7:40 to 7:15, and my Interval pace from 7:00 to 6:40. I guess my terrible performance at the Urban Wildland was just what I needed to get my butt in gear. Now onto the specifics of this week's training:

Tuesday was an interval day, so I did 4x(5:00 @ 6:40 with 3-4 mins rest).  It was probably my most impressive workout I've ever completed.  I wasn't able to get it done in the morning, so I ended up doing it in the afternoon when it was a little warm.  Normally the temperature really affects my performance, but I'm not sure I could've done any better in the cool a.m.





Thursday's run wasn't quite as great as Tuesday's, but it was still a solid run.  I did 2 miles @ 7:15, 3:00 rest, 1 mile 7:13.  Not a bad run, and those mile times are about what I ran for my best chip-timed 5k, so I'm already pretty confident I can PR in whatever my next 5k is.

As for my next races, I'm thinking about running the Crazy Horse half-marathon in South Dakota with my friend Jeff, and then trying to find a good 5k about 3 weeks later.