Thursday, May 11, 2006

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…

4 comments:

Kurt said...

Great work out DG, your doing good. Remind me again what race are you tapering for soon? Your so going to kick arse at your race.

Beach is getting warmer here all the time!

Enjoy your day and have fun running.

Andy Emerson said...

She's tapering for Marathon 2 Marathon in IA. Well, she's not tapering yet! That was a great workout!

Andy Emerson said...

She's tapering for Marathon 2 Marathon in IA. Well, she's not tapering yet! That was a great workout!

Danielle said...

Yeah, I have 2 more hard weeks, well, I think I'm going 2 1/2 and then taper time...Nothing like running through the corn fields of IA.