Monday, January 19, 2009

Daniels Week 5

5 down, lucky 13 to go. This was a good week. Got off to a slightly sluggish start after last weekend's 22 miler, but I recovered and got in a good speedworkout and another good long run. The weather went from "normal" in the early part of the week to downright tropical towards the end. The tradeoff was that the 50 degree temps came with 30 mph wind.

Monday - 8 in the morning and another 5 in the afternoon. Ended up doing both of them on the indoor track thanks to frigid windchills.

Tuesday - 12 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. Back outside.

Wednesday - 10 miles with 8 strides. Back to the indoor track. Blasted windchill...

Thursday - 12 including 7 miles of 5 minutes hard/4 minutes easy. Indoor track again. The warmup had started by this time, but the streets were covered with soft, not quite frozen and not quite slushy snow, which is a pain in the ass to run fast on.

Friday - 8 in the morning, 5 in the afternoon. What the hell?? Is it April all of a sudden. Ran outside in a long sleeve and shorts in the morning and tshirt and shorts in the afternoon. It was windy, but a warm wind is much more tolerable than a -20 degree one.

Saturday - 10 miles. Another warm, windy run.

Sunday - 18 miles that included 3 miles warmup, 2x12 minutes tempo pace with 2 minute recovery and then 1.5 hours easy. Again, it was warm (which means upper 40s) but windy as hell (around 30 mph with gusts over 40). I ran the warmup basically straight into the wind and then did the tempo portion with the wind at my back but over rolling hills. It went very well; my average pace was just under 6:30, just where I want it to be. The last 11 miles were an out and back where I tried to stay sheltered from the wind as much as possible, but there were a few stretches where the wind literally stood me up straight and it felt like I had hit a wall. All in all, a very good long run.

Total - 93 miles

This coming week will be a planned cutback week, with my mileage down around 75. I'm looking forward to it....the last couple of 90+ weeks have gone well, but it will be still be good to give the legs a little break.

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought my airplane tickets to Boston yesterday morning. After obsessively checking ticket prices for the last, oh, 6 months, they finally dipped down to the lowest I've seen em so far (which isn't really that low, but flying from Rapid City to pretty much anywhere but Vegas, Denver or Minneapolis just isn't cheap). So I snagged em. After some consideration, Shannon and I decided that I will make the trip solo. The cost/benefit of all four of us traveling there just wasn't working out quite right, especially considering that my kids (ages 3 and 5 at the time of the trip) won't really remember much of it and probably won't be very entertained by all the runner type stuff going on, or even likely see me finish in the mass of runners. So, I'm heading out of Rapid on Friday afternoon, getting to Boston at almost 10 PM and then will be flying back on Tuesday morning.

1 comment:

JojaJogger said...

Congrats on going to Boston. Having just finished my first marathon, I'm thinking of heading up to your neck of the woods for my second, the Leading Ladies marathon.