Testing Times

After Sunday’s crash and burn, Monday was never going to be more than a short, easy, slow run. In fact, I surprised myself by being able to get out of bed at all. Once out on the road the legs took a few miles to feel better but eventually I started enjoying the run. I sure felt a lot better than the day before.

I wondered if there was any point in doing the evaluation workout on Tuesday, but in the end I figured that fatigue is one of the things these workouts are supposed to flag up, so I went ahead as planned. I was quite surprised by the way my legs reacted. The first two evaluation workouts in this training cycle were a bit of an effort; while it is a rather mellow workout, I still had to work for it. Yesterday I managed to run at HR 161 pretty much on autopilot and keeping the heart rate at that level felt a lot easier. I also managed much better to stay close to 161 than on the previous 2 occasions, even without the help of the audible alarm feature.

Date          2 Jun   16 Jun    28 Jun
Mile 1         7:19     7:16      6:55
Mile 2         7:17     7:20      7:03
Mile 3         7:16     7:27      7:06
Mile 4         7:16     7:23      6:57
Time to 130      34       40        32

I was very pleasantly surprised by the figures. Not only has my pace increased, I was able to keep it reasonably constant throughout the 4 miles and the time it took for the HR to recover to 130 was the shortest yet. While there is still a good bit of speed missing until I can match the best evaluations from the Vienna training cycle, this is rather encouraging and I stopped worrying about the effects from Sunday.

Having said that, I decided nevertheless to cut back the mileage a little bit and after an email from the old coach, rapping my knuckles a bit, even managed to keep the pace very mellow for another day. Maybe I’ll get the hang of this slow running business after all. Train slower to race faster (well, at the right time, that is) – it worked last time round.

I probably should not write the next paragraph at all, it’s just tempting fate, but my knee seems to have come round. Rick pointed me to an article that exactly described my pain and blamed the ITB, so I dug out The Stick and started working. I noticed an immediate improvement, and when I got lazy on a couple of occasions and stopped using it, the knee threatened to act up again, so I’d say there is a good chance that I have finally found the solution, as long as I remember to keep using it. As much as paying 48 dollars for a glorified plastic rolling pin seemed outrageous at first, that thing has been excellent value for money after all.

27 Jun

8 miles, 1:04:01, 8:00 pace, HR 143

28 Jun

12 miles, 1:28:56, 7:25 pace, HR 150
   incl. 4 miles evaluation: 6:55, 7:03, 7:06, 6:57 (rec. 00:32)

29 Jun

8 miles, 1:03:02, 7:53 pace, HR 140