I got some great training in last week. After feeling pretty sluggish the week before, I was hoping things would improve, and sure enough they did:D I got in a run every day, and out of the seven, I'd say five were really good workouts. Ended up with 214.21km/21:01 for the week, a new record for me. The running side of things was right on track - 110km at 5:15 pace - which is really pleasing:) Once again, I had the awesome experience of feeling stronger every day. At the start of the week, I was doing my 10k magneto loop at 5:02 pace and by the end of the week I was hitting 4:33 pace! That's some serious improvement there:)
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, my big workouts weren't that great. My hill workout on Tuesday ended prematurely. I was going allright in the warmup, but once I started the hill repeats, I felt my strength dissipating with each rep. By the last rep, I was barely managing walking pace. With catastrophic muscle failure looming, there was no way I could've done the twenty minute cooldown. Still, I wasn't too disappointed with that because if the hills beat me up that much, I was going to be in for some massive supercompensation once I was recovered. And indeed, 24 hours later, I was running the magneto loop at 4:43 pace, snaring another PB in the process.
The tempo run was a bit below par too. It was still a lot better than the last couple I did, especially since I gradually sped up over the course of the workout, but to do the first 5k in 21:39 was a bit nuff-nuff. I wasn't disappointed with it though, because I was dreading doing it, and I still dragged myself out at 6am and finished the workout feeling good.
Then on Sunday, I canned my long run after 33 minutes because I just wasn't feeling good and there was no way I was going to get a PB. It's probably a bit unhealthy having the mindset that I have to get a PB each time I do one, but I just wasn't in the zone and wasn't ready to push myself into discomfort when I knew I wasn't going to enjoy it. I was still going 5:00/k when I stopped, but I could feel my strength draining away and I was a bit hungry too:P
It wasn't really surprising that the tempo run and the long run didn't turn out that great. Running in the morning just doesn't work for me. A large part of it is that I'm not recovered from the night before. Even though I held back on Saturday night, the run plus a 16k bike ride to get to and from a party probably left some residual fatigue in my legs. I really need to get into the habit of doing my running workout in the morning, because that's generally when races are, and because I have to do my tempo and long runs in the morning. It'll be interesting to see whether it's just that I need 24 hrs in between workouts or whether I'm just not a morning person. I think there's definitely an aspect of that. Running at night just feels better to me. I like running completely alone and the darkness makes it feel like I'm moving faster, even if I'm not:P
I had an awesome run on Sunday night to cap off another 70k day. The whole neighborhood was shrouded in fog and the effects the fog had on the street lighting gave the experience a sense of surrealism. It felt like a whacky kind of dream, nothing about it seemed natural. I wondered at times whether I was really running or whether the fatigue had caught up to me and I'd fallen asleep.
Next week will be interesting. I'm planning on doing an 8k time trial on Saturday morning to figure out what time I'll go for in the Run Melbourne HM. It means I really need to start conditioning myself to run in the morning! I'll do a mini taper, but I'm still aiming to get 160k in this week, so nothing too drastic.
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