Thursday Workout

Tuesday morning saw the rare occasion of seemingly all my muscles aching. I know the sore shoulders and arms came from Monday night's yoga session (my arm strength is pathetic, I knew that already), but if the sore legs were a hangover from Sunday's run or the same yoga session, or from both, I could not tell. But I think as long as I have a demanding yoga class on Monday it would be unwise to do a midweek workout on Wednesday, which pretty much reduces the midweek option to Thursday only.

After three nice and dry, if freezing cold, days, the weather had turned nasty yet again. I had hoped that the winter storms would be behind us, but while Tuesday's weather system did not qualify as a full-blown storm it sure was bad enough. I did contemplate running on the treadmill instead when I heard the wind and rain against the kitchen window as I got ready but headed out onto the road nevertheless. After all, a bit of running in character-building conditions doesn't do any harm. The run itself went well enough, especially considering that I wasn't exactly feeling on top of the world with all those aching muscles, but I was a bit alarmed but the sky-high average heart rate of 148 which would usually indicate a workout rather than an easy run. That's something that has been with me for a while now. It can be an alarm signal for overtraining but I don't think that's quite the case - I don't have any of the other symptoms.

I reckon that three easy days should be enough to recover from any but the most brutal workouts, even with a tough yoga session thrown in for good measure. Actually, my yoga muscles were still achy on Wednesday evening but thankfully that was the shoulders rather than the legs, and I was ready to run another workout on Thursday morning.

I took the fact that I was really looking forward to the workout as a very good sign. Mentally at least I was ready.

Conditions were decent enough, at least at the start. I did get caught by a couple of icy cold rain showers and the wind seemed to pick up during the second half of the run, or maybe my fatigue had me take notice eventually.

The respective paces for the faster miles were:
6:46, 6:43, 6:45, 6:51, 6:50, 6:49, 6:53, 6:52

Some of the pace differences are due to hills and/or wind direction as I was trying to keep the effort reasonably level rather than the pace. The last two were tougher than the previous ones when the fatigue started to make itself felt, especially in teh hamstrings and glutes.

The paces for the moderate miles were:
8:22, 7:16, 7:29, 7:33, 7:26, 7:46, 7:34, 7:42

with the first one being a warm-up and the rest all around 7:30 but with wind and (small) hills all having some influence.

Running the middle part of the workout in 5 miles loops had the unintended side-effect that on the second loop all the previously easy parts were part of faster miles and vice versa, which made for a nice contrast, even if I felt slightly differently on one particular hill.

All in all I'm pretty happy with how that workout went. It was much better than last week's and even the HR/pace relationship has returned to a level not seen in almost 4 weeks. to me that shows that I am recovering, from previous workouts as well as from whatever bug has been affecting me for the last few weeks.

16 Feb

8 miles, 1:02:59, 7:52 pace, HR 148

17 Feb

8 miles, 1:01:04, 7:42 pace, HR 149

18 Feb

16 miles, 1:55:58, 7:15 pace, HR 154

   alternating miles