I finished up my current training block last week. This week I’m cutting my volume back by a third and will drop down again next week leading up to Sri Chinmoy 24 Hour. Here’s how I executed against my original plan:
Yeah, nailed it. There were a couple exceptions. In week three, I cut an 8 miler a mile short because the weather was absolutely craptacular and added a mile to a run later in the week. There were a couple other weeks where I swapped some miles from one day to another. Overall, I’ll end up with about 5-10 miles more running than were on my original plan. My walking miles probably averaged closer to 30mpw than the 25 on my schedule so I overachieved there as well.
The one area I fell short on was my strength training. I was semi-consistent with it in the early weeks, but I stopped doing them once my mileage got above 50 per week. I was a little worried that I was going to end up doing too much so decided to err on the side of caution. Strength training is my biggest fail so far this year. I had these grand plans that have fallen just about completely by the wayside.
Let’s end on a high note: my long runs. I had five 20 milers scheduled this cycle and overall they went amazingly well.
- Week 4 – 3:08, 9:22/mile pace (9:24/9:20 splits)
- Week 6 – 3:06, 9:16/mile pace (9:06/9:26 splits)
- Week 7 – 2:56, 8:46/mile pace (8:50/8:42 splits)
- Week 9 – 2:54, 8:40/mile pace (8:42/8:38 splits)
- Week 10 – 3:15, 9:41/mile pace (9:23/9:59 splits)
I had a couple sub 9 minute paces runs (8:55, 8:59) on this route during my last training block so was a little disappointed the first one was this slow. Very happy with the slight negative split, which is not something I normally manage on my long runs. The second one was incrementally quicker though the positive split almost made this feel like a step back in my fitness. The third and fourth runs were mic dropping performances for me. Probably among the best executed long runs that I’ve ever done. I’m running a road course with 1500 feet of elevation gain/loss and I just felt solid from start to finish. The fifth run kinda needs an asterisk next to it. Since the run was only 2 weeks out from my race, I didn’t want to push things too much so started out easy. The temperatures were also 15-25 degrees above the prior runs so much, much hotter. I ran out of fluids right before I finished so probably ended up a little dehydrated. But I recovered like a champ and my legs felt amazing for my final 11 miler the next day so my goal of getting an easy long run in was achieved.
Now it’s time to see if all this training paid off.