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.
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