Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Easy Workout

I woke up Monday w/ a little tightness in my hamstrings, but other than that I felt OK.  Coach decided to give me a very light session for Wednesday to aid in the post race recovery.  The plan is to hit it very hard for a 10-day period starting on Saturday, then ease back some in preparation for the next race on June 18th.  

Monday's shake out run in the trails went fine, but my calf/shin issues started to resurface during Tuesday's run.  Today (Wednesday) I had an appointment w/ the CMT after the workout and she was able to loosen up the area once again.  I've got an off day tomorrow, and an easy run on Friday ahead of what will probably be a killer session, so I hope the calf/shin is good to go by then.

As far as the wo was concerned - a few moderate paced 1000s w/ 2.5-min breaks after my mile w/u and 2x200m.  The plan was to hit 3 x 1000m at about 3:25, but the calf started bothering me so I cut it to two reps (3:26, 3:22)  No sense in taking the chance of making it worse - this wasn't a real workout anyway, really more of a recovery day than an actual workout.  

At this point, I'm just hoping that the massage plus the ice, rolling, stretching, etc for a couple days allows me to hit these next few sessions as hard as they're drawn up.  This next period of the training should be the most intense before we get into July where it will be more resting and racing, and I'd like to be able to put in my best effort to maximize the gains.  

Tomorrow I'll put up a race analysis now that I've had a couple of days to assess what went well and what didn't.  I'll also draw up the analysis of what it will take to get down to that 2-flat level.  (although this is more of a 2010 goal)

Training:

Mon, 5/25:  30-minutes @ 6:54 pace

Tues, 5/26:  AM  Core, abs, stretching, rolling
PM  28-minutes @ 6:39 pace (picked it up a little due to the Wed session being so light)  **right calf/shin started to flare up again

Wed, 5/27:  2 x 1000m (supposed to be 3, cut it short due to calf)  3:26, 3:22
PM:  Appointment w/ CMT - a lot of time on calf/shin.  

2 comments:

Ewen said...

Good luck with the calf/shin before the killer workout on Saturday.

Is there going to be a period where you're just racing (twice a week?) and not much else? I'm just thinking that some regular hard racing is probably worth a few seconds.

Mike said...

Ewen - I don't think it will be possible for me to race more than once a week. Our series of local races are every Thursday night starting on June 18th and going up through August 6th I believe.

I doubt I'm going to want to race Thurs night and then Saturday during the day, especially when the Sat meet would be a very long drive most likely.

Right now the tentative plan is to go 2 weeks on, one week off starting the 18th. (so race June 18th and 25th - then take a week off - then race July 9th and 16th) Something like that.

I probably need one more stint of hard training (from now until the next race) and then we should back off on mileage and the intense lactate sessions and perhaps just do some short speed sessions between races.

Of course all of this is going to depend on this calf/shin problem. It's not as bad as it was a couple weeks ago, but I thought I was over this completely and obviously I'm not. Hopefully I can get in this intense period of training now as it will really help set me up for the rest of the season.