Thursday, July 19, 2007

Training update

It's really hot! I ran last night at 8:30, and it was still 88 degrees. Tuesday night was cooler, at 76, but was 85 percent humidity. It's tough running in the heat; just saps the strength right out of my legs.

I'm staying on schedule though, which is good. It will be my first week ever over 40 miles, and the first week I've ran seven days without a break. I'm trying to eliminate my weekly rest day and replace it with a 30 minute recovery jog. Not to say I won't take days off, I have at least one planned while I'm in Michigan. But, part of the plan is to eliminate most of them, so if I do need to take a day off, it will have less of an impact on my overall mileage.

Tuesday night we did 6x800, and with the humidity, my times were a good five seconds slower per 800 than I wanted. It still felt like a good workout, though, so I'll have to be content. I find 800s pretty discouraging, because even if I run them around 5k pace, they're still hard. With my goal to break 20 at the Gaslight 5k in September, I feel like knocking back four to six 3:15 800s should be comfortably easy. When I ran mostly 3:17-3:20 the other night, I felt pretty discouraged. So at least for my ego's sake, I'll chalk it up to the heat.

Today will be my first attempt at a tempo in a while; I'm schedule for 45 minutes and am planning to do 15 minutes of warm up, then 15 minutes of tempo (slower than 5k pace, probably 7:15-7:30 min/mi), then 15 minutes of cool down.

I definitely feel like I'm making steady progress; we ran 14 miles last Saturday at about 8:20 min/mi, which is on the low end of my McMillan pace chart recommendation.

That's all for now. I'll be back soon to post about my shoe dilemma!

1 comment:

mom said...

wonder what my 5K "walker" pace is...? may just have to figure that one out...