Evaluation

I think my training would be much easier if the week had 8 days; it would be so much easier to do all those decent workouts and still have plenty of time for recovery. But of course, that's kind of the point of my training: you keep a certain amount of pressure on the system, enough to get adaptations but mellow enough to allow recovery.

As I keep reminding myself, my 45th birthday is only a few months away. Us geriatrics don't recover as well as those whippersnappers. Mind, as it turns out, with a little bit of intelligence put into a training plan I'm still able to beat my younger self.

Following Wednesday's mountain run I took the customary two easy days. Both of them went very well, though it is rather telling that I ran a little bit faster on Friday but with a lower HR than on Thursday, on the same course under pretty much the same outside conditions.

I did some forward planning for next week, and that's when things got a little bit tricky with only 7 days available. I want to do a mountain run on Tuesday and then take it easy for 3 days before Dingle, which left no time for an evaluation workout that I wanted to do before the race, so I decided to squeeze one in on Saturday instead.

      
        Mile 1    6:42   HR 161
        Mile 2    6:47   HR 161
        Mile 3    6:50   HR 161
        Mile 4    6:52   HR 161
        Recovery to HR 130: 33 seconds

While these are clearly not the best numbers ever, I was quite pleasantly surprised. For a first evaluation at the start of a training cycle these numbers are excellent. The pace is faster than expected, 10 seconds slow-down not too bad and the recovery time is good. I'm quite pleased, I must have done more things right than wrong since Belfast - though I'm possibly about to chuck all those good things overboard by running Dingle, but I'm still firmly committed to that race.

My lesson from last week was that I shouldn't run too hard the day before a long run; I was clearly pushing my luck. Thankfully the evaluation is a rather mellow workout that doesn't require much downtime and my legs were just fine on Sunday. I ran more or less the same route around the lake as the week before and felt an awful lot better, even if the pace was almost identical. I think I took it a little bit easier at the beginning which had a positive effect on the later miles, but I just felt much better overall. That's good, a positive run before an ultra is definitely a plus.

28 Aug

10 miles, 1:19:05, 7:54 pace, HR 140

29 Aug

10 miles, 1:18:09, 7:50 pace, HR 138

30 Aug

11.8 miles, 1:28:39, 7:30 pace, HR 150
     incl. 4 mile eval: 6:42, 6:47, 6:50, 6:52, 33 sec recovery

31 Aug

17 miles, 2:14:54, 7:56 pace, HR 144

Weekly Mileage: 81+