I guess I'm getting used to these Rep/Interval sessions as there was no soreness on Sunday morning after Saturday's repeats. This meant the long run was on.
Unfortunately it was raining, and has been for most of the week, making the trails quite messy. At times it felt like you were running w/ suction cups on the bottom of your shoes as you could hear that "suction sound" when picking up your feet from time to time. (I imagine Grellan would have had a field day bare footing through this slop!)
Nonetheless, it was a good run. I'm running these longer ones much more aggressively lately, especially towards the end. Sunday's effort was a 12-miler w/ the first seven at about 7:10 pace, and the last five at 6:34 with the middle 3-miles of those five at 6:23. The total time was 1:22:58, netting me a 6:55 average pace.
I feel like the training is going pretty well right now. This weekly combination of the short fast reps, the longer intervals (which are the toughest), and the aggressive long run seem to be feeding off each other in a way where each workout type helps the others. I imagine this will plateau after a few more weeks, but I know JT's got something in the works (where she'll likely ratchet up the intensity further as we approach the short winter track season)
I've got rough schedule for my upcoming seasons, and when I get a few more details I'll post it up here. I think the idea is going to be to just run a few races in the winter to see where I'm at. I'll be training right through so there will be no attempt to run a "peak" race during the winter - it's the spring/summer season where we'll go for the best times. Also, there will be no fast speed work before the winter season, JT doesn't want me trying to go too quickly in the cold weather - we'll save that work building up to the subsequent season in the spring. I still have a lot of work to do before I'm ready to run a decent 800m - I'm sure a lot of heavy lactate training is coming soon - but there's only about 6-weeks until the season starts, so I've gotta get ready!
Training:
Sun, 12/21: 12-miles in 1:22:58, (6:55 pace) HR-158
2 comments:
Barefooting in the rain is great fun. Your feet build up heat which makes it great splashing through puddles to cool them down. Unseasonally dry here at the moment though.
You're certainly heading for a plateau with long runs like that on wet trails. Will you have to come back down before upping the ante again for the spring/summer season or will you run through without taking your foot off the gas. I ask because my experience with speedwork suggests recovery is required after reaching a peak/plateau. Then again it may be different for 800/1500m training.
The plan is to keep hammering through the winter season which goes until the end of February, however I'm sure we'll back off on the hard long runs during the actual season and focus more on the speed stuff.
After February, we back off completely for about 5-6 weeks and go back into a mini "build mode". There I'm going to take it easy on the pace and focus on getting the mileage up a little. But come second half of April we start bringing up the intensity again and I believe by early-mid May I'll start the fastest/most intense training of the year.
When the Summer season ends in early August - I get a nice long 3-month period to build back up again for the 2010 seasons. There I'm hoping to really build on the '08/'09 running and try to get the mileage up to 65-70/week.
I've never done this middle distance training before, but I'm starting to get a feel for the "pattern". I'm going to be getting more details of the training plan from coach in the next 2-weeks - I'll post it up when I know more.
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