Week 11 Training Update

16 Nov

I continue to make novice training mistakes. My goal was to run 42 miles this week, and I find myself taking three days of rest (Monday, Thursday, and today) and being forced to settle with 34. The reason? I'm simply running my miles too hard. Even on "easy" days I'm doing at least 6:20 pace. My long run of 10-12 miles has essentially become a long tempo at 6:10-6:15 pace, which is forcing me to work way too hard. Basically, I have not been doing easy runs. My brain automatically urges me forward at 6:20 or faster, because I subconsciously believe that anything slower simply isn't worth my time. Unfortunately, this approach to training has lately caused a great deal of fatigue, so much so that I can't even run three consecutive days. Yesterday I went to the canal for my usual long run. I planned on doing 40 minutes out, 40 minutes back. I started on what I thought was a comfortable clip, only to pass the 5 mile mark at 6:12 pace. I ended up turning around at 38 minutes. I took my heart rate at this point, and it was 160. That's just too hard for a long run. After 60 minutes at this same pace, my legs were simply too dead to continue. I took a quick rest and jogged the remaining two miles. For the rest of the day I felt absolutely drained of energy. I ended up taking a two hour nap, followed shortly by nine hours of sleep! I'm just not training smart. I need to adhere to the hard-easy formula. Run your hard days hard, and your easy days easy, meaning minimal effort. I should not be going faster than 6:40 on recovery days, and my long run should be around 6:50 pace. I'm going to put this plan into action next week. If I do things correctly, I should be able to complete 47 miles with three hard workouts (Tuesday intervals, Thursday tempo, and Sunday mile repeats), two recovery runs on Monday and Wednesday, and the Saturday long run. We'll see how this goes. I can still get in three and a half good weeks of training before my next test, the Fiesta Bowl 5K on 14 Dec. It's a flat course so I'm shooting for a sub 16:20 performance.