A Rough One

Again, the tough ones make us stronger right? So I have been a bit tight lately, OK for a long time, it was for a long time my left side, kind of along the IT band and I’ve been meaning to get a massage but have yet to do that…It’s always been a bit tight, but fine when I’m running. Suddenly it shifted and now it’s the right side, in the problem area and I can’t seem to loosen it up. I’m stretching it a lot, and really once I’m running it loosens up and feels fine, but I always seem to start a bit stiffly…yesterday was no exception…

Normally Thursday is my tempo day and Tuesday is intervals, this week is messed up cause I realized Monday that I have to work tonight and I couldn’t do my workout tonight, so I had to switch the hard ones to Monday and Wednesday and I wasn’t mentally prepared for the intervals on Monday so I did tempo, which was OK but humid so a bit slower and intervals last night…Intervals were on a flat, limestone trail, old railroad track and I finally figured out how to recover my splits so I can even put them from this run and last intervals in finally!! Since last week I had done 5 x 1s with plan for 7:30-7:45 and managed 7:02 for the slowest and 6:51 for two of them, I thought doing 6 x 1 this week I should be able to hit 7:00 or so again, so goal was 7:00-7:15 or so…well, that didn’t quite workout. My overall run was 11 miles in 1:35, average of 8:41 pace, but that was because the recoveries were incredibly slow mainly because I had to stop and stretch almost each one. The problem came because I warmed up, then ran hard, then walked a bit, that tightened up my legs and it took the first part of the next repeat to get loose again. Times looked like this:

Mile 1 – 7:24
Mile 2 – 7:18
Mile 3 – 7:01
Mile 4 – 7:06
Mile 5 – 7:13
Mile 6 – 7:05

OK, not very consistent, but oh well. The run averaged 7:33 I think according to my Garmin for 8 miles, then I had the warm up mile and cool down mile and a half, plus some stretching between warmup and first interval.

While I was running I passed one guy, but he came up on me while I was trying to massage and stretching my hamstring and he said something to the effect of that sucks and I agreed and said normally I’m OK but just been tight lately. I passed him then on my interval and he said the weather is a bit cool, which yes, that I agree with and part of why I wasn’t staying warm, I was in shorts and short sleeved shirt and tights would've definitely helped me on this one. It was also a bit windy heading out, but had it at my back coming back thankfully…probably why the first one was so much slower than the rest. Not sure about mile 5 though.

Two more hard interval workouts (7 x 1 for the next two) before taper…