Last week was the first week of really solid good spring weather this year. Unfortunately, it has become painfully obvious that spring is not here to stay....as I type this I'm sitting at home on a Monday morning because everything has been shut down by a spring blizzard. It was 77 degrees yesterday. Today, we're suppoed to get 2-3 feet of snow, 50-60 mph winds and it's supposed to last until tomorrow night. This is what passes for spring in South Dakota. Anyhoo, while it was nice last week I got in a decent week of running:
Monday - 6 in the morning, 5 in the afternoon. Nice, easy recovery double.
Tuesday - 6 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon. Ditto.
Wednesday - 10 with 8 strides.
Thursday - 14.7 total including 7 miles easy, 6x6 minutes tempo, and 1 mile cooldown.
Friday - 6 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon. I could really get used to the "low" mileage stuff.
Saturday - 8. Ran it on the Rapid City bike path because we spent the night in Rapid after watching the Rush hockey game (they won 6-4) on Friday night. My wife ran the Dublin Dash 5K on Sat. morning, so we just spent the night instead of driving back and forth.
Sunday - 20. This run was supposed to include two sets of 4x5 min. tempo intervals. After 2 miles of warmup, I started into the first set. I was running straight into a headwind and the first interval went okay. But, a couple of minutes into the second interval I realized I was going slower than marathon pace and the headwind was only getting worse, so I bagged it. I had hoped that once I turned around and put the wind at my back I'd be able to finish the second set, but by the time I had run 10 miles into that headwind, I just couldn't convince my legs that running tempo pace would be a good idea. So, it just turned into a regular old 20 miler.
Total - 83.7 miles
Like I mentioned, the weather this week is off to craptacular start. It's not supposed to improve all that much all week, so looks like my indoor track running isn't over quite yet (provided of course that the gym isn't closed because of the blizzard). I'm just hoping that this is truly our last blizzard of the spring...if this happens again on April 17th (the day I fly to Boston), there will be hell to pay. I'm not sure who's gonna pay, but someone (I'm looking at you Mother Nature).
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the big news of the week. The Boston bib numbers were posted and I'm going to be wearing 5189, which means that I start in corral 5 of wave 1. It also means I was fairly close to being in corral 4...if only I'd finished about a minute faster at Missoula. For those not in the know, they herd the runners at Boston into 26 different corrals split amongst two different waves to avoid total mass chaos at the start. You get seeded based on your qualifying time. Wave one starts first and each corral starts about 1 minute apart from one another to attempt to space the runners out at the start a little bit. So, I'll at least have the majority of the runners behind me when I start. Hopefully, that will also be the case when I finish. And, hopefully I'll finish 5,188th or better so I can achieve the goal of beating my bib number. The cool thing is that numbers on my bib add up to 23, and my birthday is May 23rd.
3 comments:
Can you say four weeks? Good luck, and I'll be "watching" you online.
Great week! Wind is the worst, but your 20 miler was impressive nonetheless. I can't believe the race is so soon! Your number is crazy low, quit yer bitchin.
Don't fret the weather too much, you have tons o' training in the bag that you just need to maintain. Amost taper time. Hang in there!! :)
Chris,
You will love running Bahston!
I was in corral #5 last year.
I'll predict that you will pass 3,000 people and finish 2,188th or better.
I'm serious about that.
Go out and rock that course!!
Can't wait to hear the results from you.
John
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