Weekly Sweats: Cliffhanger!

 

This week's highlights: an estimated 30-ish miles, two strength workouts, and one cliffhanger.

I'm linking up with the Weekly Run Down, please head over to Kim and Deborah to check it out.

Confession of the week: I don't like Sunday races.  It's not a religious thing, it's a life philosophy/blogging thing.

From the life philosophy standpoint, I like the clean break of starting my weekend with the Big Event, whether it be a race or my long run and then spending the rest of the weekend resting and daydreaming about it before I go back to work on Monday.  If for some reason I'm not able to run on Saturday due to weather or life events, then I have Sunday as a backup to do my run.  Alcohol wise, running interferes greatly with my drinking, so it's nice to splurge on Saturday night if I want to.

From the blogging standpoint, Sunday mornings are my time to muse over the past week's fitness adventures and write it all out.  I like having the space of 24 hours since the event to reflect back on things.  I do much better if I think before I write.

All of which is to say that I am clicking the publish button ahead of today's race.  Sorry to leave you with a cliffhanger on how the Great Uphill 15k turned out, but there is no way that I'll be able to do it justice if I write about it immediately after the race.  I'll drop a wristie and a few thoughts on the insta sometime this afternoon.  If it's a great race it will get its own post sometime next week, and if I turns out like I expect it to, I'll say something about it in next week's post.

So here is how my fitness week went:

Monday: Weights and 4.5 miles.  I did the run at a deliberately slow and relaxed effort and had the same result as last week with my highest average heart rate of the week. I'm going to put a pause on the turtle efforts for a while.

Tuesday: 6.25 miles total.  I don't know how to say this besides Monday me and Tuesday me were not the same person.  My workout was from RunCoach.  1.25 miles warm up, 1 mile @ 10:08, 2 x half mile at 9:43, 1 mile @ 10:08, cool down.  I haven't run paces like that in a while, so I set my pace warnings for 10:30 for the miles and 10:00 for the halfs and tried not to remember what the paces were "supposed" to be in the moment.

Results: I ran 10:19 for the first mile, 9:39 pace for both half miles (seriously - I was unaware that I had even splits until after the workout), and then 10:13 for the 2nd mile.  More importantly I felt great for the rest of the day.  So that is none too shabby.

Wednesday: weights, no running.

Thursday: hey can I have Tuesday me back?  My plan was to do another speed workout from RunCoach, but I didn't sleep very well that night.  Without starting there was no way to know if it was going to be a case of "feel bad run good" or "trainwreck city", so I kicked off my planned workout.  I felt pretty good for my warm up and the beginning of my first interval.  And then I started struggling to hold the pace so I backed off and "just ran".  6.25 miles.

Friday: I had two orders of business to take care of on this run.  Thing one: crash Kim's pi party.  Thing two: get my Lucky's out of the box and put some miles on them before Sunday's race.  TBH, I don't think that it's necessary to "break in" running shoes in this day and age BUT even though they have shamrocks I'm not about to push my luck.

Saturday: I now have in my possession 4 safety pins, a race bib, and a sweatshirt.

Sunday: tune in next week to find out how the 15k turned out!

What's Next

I'll be cranking out the virtual Shamrock Shuffle next weekend.  I may not live in Chicago but I do have a 5 mile race in my town, so I can at least use a real race course.

Following up on last week's post, I'm getting closer to firing my "coach" a.k.a myself.  I simply don't know what I am doing and it's time to turn it over to someone who does. I won't do anything about this next week, but my goal is to contact the coach that I've picked out by the end of March.