HUNKER DOWN

If I go through with it, my next race will be in a month. I used to run the Winter Carnival half marathon ever year as a benchmark to see how my winter training has been going. It was a nice out-and-back course with some rolling hills. I haven’t done this race in a few years. When I searched for it online, I found that it’s going to be held on the State Fair Grounds and you can run 5K increments anywhere from 5K to 20K. This has me thinking it’ll a 5K loop run multiple times. Not exactly what I was looking for, but if I just want a benchmark, I guess it will suffice.

The last 2 weeks I’ve been including workouts from the Run Like a Pro book I mentioned in my last post. Even though the book has workout plans for 5K, 10K, half-marathon, marathon, and ultra, the workouts aren’t that different between them. The book states that one of the more common mistakes that non-elites make is over-specializing their training for a particular race. The workouts listed within the 2-week recaps below were all run on the treadmill. Mainly because the weather these last 2 weeks has been quite snowy – on two separate occasions I’d say we got 6-8” of snow over the course of 2-3 days. This makes for really poor footing for your average run, let alone a workout. The second occasion of snow was followed by a week of temps around 0 degrees with a strong wind. It's times like that where I just try to hunker down and do what I can. 

While the treadmill can be quite boring, I will say that I do like having the ability to dial in on specific paces for harder workouts - especially when I haven't done "real" training in a long time. I was thinking today that it's been kind of fun to run a race and then punch those results into a calculator that tells me what paces I should be running for different workouts - then going out and executing them.  

RECAP OF WEEK 12/11 – 12/17

Sunday – 10-mile fat bike ride & easy 3-mile run

Monday – Strength + 2 miles easy

Tuesday – 8K skate ski

Wednesday – 6 miles fartlek – 1/2/3/2/1/2/3-minutes “on” w/ 1:00 “off” [1’s at 5K, 2’s at 10K, 3’s at HMP]

Thursday – AM: 2-mile shuffle, NOON: 5 miles easy

Friday – AM: 5-mile run, NOON: 7K classic ski

Saturday – Day off – daughter’s college graduation

Summary: 24 miles of running, 10 miles of biking, 15K of skiing and 1 strength training

 

RECAP OF WEEK 12/18 – 12/24

Sunday – 13-mile-long run (longest run recently)

Monday – AM: Strength, PM: 3 miles easy

Tuesday – Easy 4-mile run

Wednesday – 7-mile Critical Velocity (CV) workout – 5 x 4:00 @ 7:10 pace w/ 2:00 easy

Thursday – Easy 16-mile bike ride on trainer

Friday – AM: 2-mile shuffle, PM: easy 4-mile run

Saturday – 5.5-mile Max Aerobic Speed (MAS) workout – 8 x 1:00 @ 6:24 pace w/ 2:00 jog

Summary: 38.5 miles of running, 16 miles of biking, no skiing and 1 strength training

Quote of the day;

“The quieter you become the more you are able to hear.” - Rumi