Thursday, July 30, 2009

W9D4

"You've got to roll with it, baby" - Steve Winwood

This has happened in quite a while, but tonight's planned run didn't go quite as planned. The plan was another 10 miler with 8 miles at marathon pace. I did this same workout last week on Tuesday, 3 days after my successful 18 miler. I've got the 20 miler looming out there on Saturday so I thought about flopping this week's schedule around and doing the 10 miler on Tuesday and the easy 4 today. But thinking back to the weekend with the decreased miles and leisurely pace of the half marathon I figured I'd stick to the schedule as written.

Where I jump onto the river trail is just about midway of the run. I go 2.5 miles out and back one way and 2.5 miles out and back the other. Because its not quite half way my warm up mile was only about 3/4 of a mile. Off I went. My goal pace was 9:00 miles, just like last week.

Mile 1 ticked off in 9:06, 2 and 3 were 8:43 and 8:48. It was still early on but man I was tired. My legs had no energy and my arms were sore. Mile 4 was 8:57. Mile 5 and things deteriorated badly. I took two walk breaks during that mile and it took a lot to eke out another 8:57 mile.

At that point I decided to shut it down. I did two more miles of cool down, one at 10:02 and the last at 9:16 (so there was still something left) and then the last quarter of a mile or so to finish off the 8 mile run in 1:13:37.

I'm not really sure what caused the melt down. I may have been the heat. The schedule may have just caught up with me. It might have been the donut and chocolate chip cookie I had a work today.

I will take advantage of Friday's rest day and hopefully be ready to grind out 20 miles on Saturday morning. Roll with it, Baby!

1 comment:

Wes said...

Sometimes the fatigue just saps you. Ya know? That's when you have to decide if the mental toughness of pushing through, and we know that's what our races will entail, is a training plus, or a training negative (damage our body). If its the later, then pack it up and bring it home....