Bad Day

Today I hit the track for the 4-mile Tempo run.  I pushed out from Wednesday to Thursday again, however the reason this week was due to residual adductor/hamstring soreness from Monday's weightlifting session.  I ran a couple of easy days on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I certainly felt ready to go this morning.

At 200m into the run I knew something was wrong - I was having a difficult time breathing and I felt as though I was already 2-3 miles into the run.  Very odd.  The first half mile came in right at 3:00 which was slow.  I picked it up a little and finished the first mile in 5:56 - right on pace (expectation was 5:57-5:55-5:54-5:52 for the 4-miles) but I didn't feel well at all.  I came through mile-2 in 6:00 exactly and just shut it down.  My breathing was awful, and my HR was slightly elevated even though the pace was slow.  Initial thought - "what the hell just happened!  How do I have trouble breathing 200m into a 4-mile run!?"  

In all honesty, I still don't know what went wrong.  My body was simply in no mood to run today.  Physically the adductors are still a little sore, perhaps my stride length could suffer a bit, but that wasn't the issue.  My quad was no different than last week, so that wasn't the issue.  No, from a muscle/joint perspective I was certainly OK.  Maybe I'm coming down w/ a bug?  I don't know, but if I am I've run under the weather before and it hasn't bothered me too much - I don't think that's it either.

After a few hours to reflect I came up w/ the only explanation that would seem to make sense:  a general slacking in the taking care of myself department over the past 2-3 weeks.  Sleep has been down, nutrition has been lax, and I essentially stopped taking vitamins after I ran out a week ago.  I doubt any one of those things would matter all that much, but perhaps combined along w/ some slight soreness in the legs adds up to a bad day.  Has to be something, right?  I didn't just lose a whole bunch of fitness in 72-hours.  

So I'm not going to worry about it.  Here's the plan.  #1 - Take the rest of the day off.  #2 - Make sure my nutrition is back to where it should be and take the vitamins every day.  #3 - Get some sleep!  #4 - Throttle back the efforts for a few days.  

I'm going to take a very easy day tomorrow, then run a few up-tempo miles on Sat in the 6:10 range and see how that feels - unless I have a legit physical issue this should be pretty easy.  If I struggle, then something is physically wrong.  If I'm OK, I'll take a couple more easy days and then look to get back into the workouts.  

Training:

Tue, 11/11:  AM  4-miles @ 7:25 pace

                    PM 6-miles @ 7:28 pace, HR-144

Wed, 11/12:  lifting (upper-B, abs)  stretching, rolling

                       6-miles @ 7:05 pace, HR-148

Thurs, 11/13:  3-miles, including 2-miles @ 5:58 pace.  (should have been 4-mile Tempo.  trouble breathing from outset, stopped after 2-miles)