Kicking Into Gear

Slowly, very slowly, the training is revving up. The coach is following a different strategy compared to what I would have chosen on my own, but that's exactly why I got a coach - I felt I really needed help and had to change things. She sure has changed things already, and we're still only at the beginning.

Sunday's run pretty much sucked. The HR alarm was beeping before I had even left the driveway - already? You've gotta be kidding me! It didn't get much better, I had to slow down to a crawl and even then the alarm kept going off. The only time I managed to get into some sort of rhythm was when I could not hear the alarm because the wind was howling so loudly, but obviously that only ever lasted until I became aware of it.

Monday was better, thank goodness. For some reason I just managed to stay in the zone even though the effort felt the same as the day before - however, the pace was slower as the GPS data showed. That's definitely something that has me a bit worried: my pace/HR is still stuck at the same level as a week ago when I would have expected it to improve; after all, I have one extra week of recovery since the race by now. It's a bit early to start panicking, though.

Tuesday was a radical departure from the easy runs in the shape of the first speed workout! It wasn't particularly tough, neither by opace nor duration, but it was a lot faster than anything I have done in a while. After the warm up I did 4 sets of 1 minute at 5k effort and 3 minutes at 10k/half marathon effort, though it was a bit tricky to figure out into what pace that would translate, especially since I'm so far off peak fitness. Instead of trying to hit a certain pace I tried to run by feel, which seemed to work reasonably well except for the third slower segment when the legs (or was it the lungs?) were close to quitting and I slowed down a lot more than I should have. It provided enough extra recovery to get the rest of the workout done, though.

All in all I was happy enough. I had been looking forward to some pain during all those slow recovery runs in the past few days, so I can't complain that it hurt. Besides, it was a short workout and was over quickly (that's going to change!).

Now it's back to recovery runs again but I guess this time even my legs will admit that they need it!

10 Jul

4 miles, 38:44, 9:38 pace, HR 134

11 Jul

4 miles, 39:30, 9:52 pace, HR 130

12 Jul

5 miles, 40:04, 8:01 pace, HR 158

   4 x (1 min 5k effort / 3 min 10k or HM effort)