Onto the Next Phase

After a two day break to recover from the bug I went to the track this morning to get a better sense of how I was feeling.  I planned on starting out at whatever pace my body felt like going and slowly ramping down to something around 6:15-6:20 pace.  I didn't want to turn it into a workout, but I wanted to go quickly enough to make an assessment as to whether or not I was back at 100%.  

I started the run at a pace that felt comfortable and that wound up being 6:23.  The next mile was 6:14, then 6:06 and I decided that was enough - mission accomplished - physically I'm fine.  I'm probably going to run an easy 4-5 miler this evening just to get in some miles.

The 4-mile tempo effort that was supposed to happen last week was going to be the last threshold workout for a while; concluding a 10-week period where it was the primary focus.  Meaning that this week we were to start preliminary speed work.  (in addition to the 4 hill sessions I have left)  I talked it over w/ my coach and we were in complete agreement that we should stick to the plan and start the speed work this week as opposed to getting in that last T-workout and pushing the speed work out another week.  

My base training has gone in several stages and this period of increasing mileage and running a lot of T-sessions to build endurance has gone extremely well, but after 10-weeks it's time to proceed to the next phase.  The 3k-3k-2k session where I hit paces of 5:55, 5:51, and 5:48 respectively was a nice capper to that phase of the training as my T-pace was in the 6:08-6:12 neighborhood when we started.  

The long Sunday run will still be there, and the easy days are also unchanged.  I'll just be substituting a speed session where the T-session used to be.  After the hills are completed, that day will be replaced by another speed session that has a slightly different focus. 

FINALLY - I get to start some middle-distance training that will be fast and fun!  This will just be the preliminary stuff, and we're going to ramp up the intensity slowly.  The first workout will be in and out 200s, somewhere between 12-16 reps w/ a 200m jog in between.  The pace will probably be in the comfortable range of 33-38 seconds.  

I'm going to try posting a re-cap of my base training to this point in tabular format where you can see the number of total sessions/month, monthly mileage, # of threshold, rep, interval, and hill sessions etc.  

Training:  

Fri & Sat, 11/14-15:  No running - feeling sick.

Sun, 11/16:  AM  3-miles @ 6:15 pace HR-157 (at track)

                     PM 4-miles easy