Recovery, reshmovery. This was a tough week!
Well, okay, it really wasn’t. My perspective is skewed because today’s run was a hard effort. A very hard effort, done a couple of days after another hard effort — which I did late in the day, so had only about 36 hours between hard efforts rather than the usual 48.
The “recovery” days were also made harder by running snow. Didn’t I say very recently that I wasn’t going to run in snow again? Well, forget I said that. Because I ran in snow again. Twice. My excuse? Besides the fact that treadmill time is the slowest unit of time in the known universe, I don’t feel good about missing my strides. So I went out and did them on a snowy track.
I felt very “Rocky IV” this week, running in the snow. All I lacked was a supporting beam strapped to my shoulders and a kindly old man with a tipped over oxen cart in need of righting by some strong young thing with a curled lip and a Brooklyn accent.
Tuesday’s easy run with 10 minutes of 5K effort tacked on was actually sort of fun, owing to the fact that I felt pretty rested, having taken Monday off. Although I ran the first half of this out and back into a headwind, so I was pretty worn down by the time it came to doing the fast miles.
Wednesday and Thursday were the aforementioned snow runs. Friday was a bit of a bastard; half an hour is a long time to run at 10K effort. It’s practically a 10K race (well, okay, I exaggerate). I wasn’t thrilled with the paces, but I was tired and going by heart rate. 6:59-7:05 gave me 88-91% MHR. I didn’t want to completely kill myself on this run since I knew what was coming up on Sunday.
Which brings us to today, which called for a 16 miler with 75 minutes at marathon effort. In my case, that’s close to 10 miles on the nose at a 7:20-7:34 pace. I played with the treadmill speed to give my leg muscles some variety, and really only did the lower range for a few miles. What’s interesting is that I didn’t find this too difficult to do until the final 10 minutes, when fatigue set in and my heart rate crept up fairly quickly to 87% over the last mile.
The whole run took 2:10 — during which I watched one of my favorite flicks, Mulholland Drive, on our new treadmill room television. This movie is David Lynch’s masterpiece — the movie I like to think that he spent his entire career on a trajectory toward.* Every time I watch that movie, I spot something new (easier to do on a 26″ screen than on a 12″ inch screen, by the way) and ponder the disjointed story from a new perspective, developing a slightly altered theory about what it all means.
Truth be told, I probably could have run more of the miles at 7:20 pace today. But I have two 90 mile weeks coming up — followed by 19 weeks of real marathon training. There will be plenty of work to do soon enough.
Week 8, the penultimate week of basebuilding, features a 14 miler, a 10 mile easy run with a full 25 minutes (in intervals) at 5K effort, two days of longer doubles and…and…a 20 miler with the last 15 minutes at 5K-8K effort. Jeeheezus…
In case this all weren’t real enough, I just registered online for the Newport, OR marathon in late May. That’s where all this madness is leading.
*Interested Lynch fans might also read my review of INLAND EMPIRE from a couple of years back.
Filed under: basebuilding, movies, training | 10 Comments »
Races Like a Girl 