Monday, June 30, 2008

LUCKILY

Luckily, most mornings I’m able to get up and get my run in without much fanfare. Then there are mornings like this morning. As I backed my car out of the driveway at 4:40, all I could think was, "WTF am I doing? Amy and the girls will be sleeping for 2 more hours and I’m going out for a hard workout."

No, I didn’t pull back into the garage, but that would have been sweet. Instead I got in a great workout; 16 miles in 2:07, including a 2 mile warm-up, 2 x 1.5 miles at tempo with a 2 minute rest, 1 hour easy, 2.25 miles at tempo, 1.5 mile cool-down.

I made a conscious effort to start a little quicker so that my first mile wouldn’t be like 7:00 as it has been in other workouts lately. It ended up being around 6:35, which is better but could still stand to be a little faster. While running the easy hour portion of the workout I was really dreading dropping back down to tempo pace. I was thinking I’d be lucky if I manage 7:00 pace, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself running 6:31 pace.

I closed out last week with a 12 miler on Saturday giving me 59 miles for the week on 6 runs. This morning’s workout was actually supposed to be run Sunday, but sleep and family stuff got in the way and I ended up just running an easy 8 miles yesterday.

All this means that I closed out June with 265 miles on 27 days of running, including 3 double days. While that’s down a ways from my 301 in May, I’ve also added in a lot more workouts during the last 5 weeks.

I can’t end this post without addressing the women’s 10,000m. Around 8 PM on Friday I realized the race was on TV. I set my alarm and crashed for an hour. I was glad I woke up because it was a great race. Of course I hated seeing Katie McGregor finish 4th again, but Amy Begley ran an incredible race. She had to run sub-31:45 to make the team and she ended up running 31:43.6 and did so by running a huge negative split, like 16:11/15:32, including a 67-second last lap.

Be sure to check out the men's 5,000m tonight from 8 - 10 PM Central on USA.

Quote of the day;

“Amy really is the story of the night. She ran amazing. We have been together every step for the past year and she is the perfect example of hard work paying off.” – Kara Goucher, referring to Amy Begley

5 comments:

Adam said...

Nice job on the tempo pace - sometimes you just have to trust that you've got it in you and let it rip.

Adam said...

Hey Chad,
I've noticed that you do a lot of the segmented tempo runs as opposed to the sustained effort of a specific time. Is this just for the variety to keep things interesting, or are there other advantages to breaking it up?

I'm going to start a new hybrid tempo segment next week. It's going to be a 40 minute segment with the first 1/3 at 60 minute Daniels tempo pace, the middle third at 40 minute tempo pace and the final third at 20 minute tempo pace.

Chad said...

Adam H #1, I agree, I probably do think about it too much at times.

Adam H #2, I'm just trying to follow the Daniels plan. He does have some 45-50 minute tempos coming up, but right now everything seems to be broken up. I think he believes that allows you to do more work, meaning I can probably handle (physically and mentally) 35 minutes of tempo split up than 35 minutes straight.

And congrats on the PR at Gma's. I tried to go to your blog afterwards, but it said something about invited guests only.

Adam said...

Thanks Chad, the new blog is mnultrarunner.blogspot.com. I think I saw you in the beer tent after the race. You were with some other people and when I went to say hello you were gone...was that you?

Chad said...

Adam, it could have been. I was in the beer tent (or just outside of it) for awhile after the race. Thanks for the link to your new blog.