“A man needs hobbies, That’s why I’ve never played a solo on the Devil’s clarinet.”
It has been a long week and a half but I will try to keep the summary brief. I have been piling on the mileage since my last race and trying to get up early for morning runs to help with this. My workouts keep improving in pace and so have my long marathon workouts and tempo runs. During this block of training I am trying to get in back to back to back 120 mile weeks before taking a down week and I am rounding out two weeks at that with one last week remaining to reach my immediate goal right now. I know the training I am doing now will help me with my racing and training later into next year as long as I can keep the training solid through to next year, I’m trying to look long term.
And after looking at what I am running right now for my tempo runs compared to how fast I was able to run them in my last two marathon build-ups it is probably a good idea to look long term because even though these workouts are getting faster each week I am still a ways off from those other build-ups.
Moving forward, last Wednesday our group met at the Richmond track for some mile repeats, 8 of them off a 90 second rest. It was busy as hell on the track so we spent the first few intervals scaring people out of lane one before the walkers and slower walkers figured out there was a workout happening. I felt I had a good workout even though I was left in the dust by Dylan W.( something that is becoming a common theme right now) but I was able to hit 4:46/4:48/4:42/4:45/4:41/4:46/4:48/4:47, for the workout.
Two days later we had a 15 mile marathon tempo down at Stanley park. Again Dylan had a good one and ended up a ways ahead of us at the end. I was able to run faster for 15 miles than I was able to handle for the 10 miler we did at Stanley park a couple weeks ago. I hit 26:01/26:25/26:36 for each 5 mile loop giving me a total of 1:19:01 for the 15 miles, a 5:17 mile average. I have been able to run this workout before in 1:16 so I am a ways off that but maybe this means I am timing my peak for this marathon build-up better than in the past( the last few build-ups I have felt that I was at my best a week to 12 days earlier than the race). So I pretty good work out that wrapped up a 125 mile week.
Sunday , and the start of my week, was just two easy runs that day because of the workout the day before and that followed another mileage day Monday. Tuesday we had another big one; Dylan and both Richards came out to my place to runs some in and out kilometers on the same loop we ran the in and out miles we did a couple weeks ago. After a 3 mile warm-up Dylan W, Richard and myself had 16 kilometers to run with 1km hard, 1km easy and repeat. Richard and I stuck together for the entire workout with Dylan up ahead of us a bit. We hit for an average of 3:01-3:03 for the hard efforts and 3:25-3:30 for the easy km’s. We finished off with a 4 mile cool down for a total of 16.50 miles. We all practiced taking in fluids during the workout but I haven’t put the figures into my spreadsheet to see if I was on the acceptable weight ratio loss yet, but I have a feeling I did alright. At the end of the run I was feeling depleted so I got some food in me right away and took it easy the rest of the day.
Next up for me is the BC cross country champs on Saturday. The race is out here in Aldergrove this year which is close to where I live so no better year to finally win this race outright, I am also racing with my club on a Prairie Inn Harrier team so that should be fun as well. I hope I can dig out my cross spikes for the race I think I know where they are.
