Reverse Fatigue

Since we waited until Thursday to do the interval workout it was inevitable that I would not be fully recovered by the weekend so the coach binned the back-to-back workouts and told me to do a "normal" long run on Sunday instead.

Saturday was unchanged though, so I went out for 10 miles with 7 faster than MP. It was a nice sunny morning but with plenty of wind, which did not help. I made things worse by starting out too fast. You'd have thought that I should have learned to control Saturday's pace by now, but you'd be wrong. I paid the price for my stupidity towards the end of that run; not only could I feel the fast early pace but also each of Thursday's intervals, and I could not help but think that I really should have known better.

I had initially toyed with the idea of running my workout in Cork in the afternoon as I had over 2 hours there during the twins' classes, but was glad that I did not because it was a truly miserable afternoon with plenty of wind and heavy rain. Be grateful for small mercies, Thomas.

Well, I sure was grateful that I did not have to kill myself today. When I'm aiming for a certain pace I tend to run the reasonably flat loop through Killorglin but when I'm out for a plain old long run you can always find me on the very hilly loop around Caragh Lake. Climbing up almost 600 feet was very hard work, especially after the two hard runs over the last three days, but every time I glanced at the Garmin I saw that I was clipping along at a good pace. The HR, however, was really high, much higher then I would have expected from perceived effort alone. I guess it's down to fatigue from the past few days. I found it basically impossible to slow down; I ran the entire run on autopilot, and every time I tried to slow down I was back in the old groove as soon as I switched back to automatic.

The legs had been very heavy at the start of the run but felt better with every mile. It was like fatigue was working backwards today.

One loop is 16.5 miles; as I passed our driveway I wondered how much I should add on. Initially I had planned on doing 20 miles but with the high HR that seemed unwise, so I decided to do only 18. However, when I reached the turnaround point a little devil on my shoulder whispered seductively into my ear to go on for a wee bit longer. It did the same again on the turnaround point for mile 19, but this time I did not listen and turned around anyway, a last token effort towards sanity.

The high HR today was really abnormal. I felt better and better the longer I ran for and the effort level seemed to drop as the HR kept rising. I haven't seen this before, but after intervals on Thursday, faster than MP on Saturday and a long run on Sunday it does not take a genius to work out that I'm fatigued, no matter how good I'm feeling.

By the way, I've started logging my daily workouts here if you want to keep track, but since I've only just started, there is not much there yet. I'm toying with the idea of putting the entire training cycle up there, but that would take a lot of work so don't hold your breath.

19 Mar

10 miles, 1:06:34, 6:39 pace, HR 162
   incl. 7 miles @ 6:32 pace, HR 166

20 Mar

19 miles, 2:20:36, 7:24 pace, HR 154

Weekly Mileage: 75