Lean Horse: Week 2

I imagine at some point I'll come up with more imaginative post titles than "Lean Horse: Week X" but for now I'm being lazy about it. I could call it "Free beer for anyone who comments on this post" but then I'd just have an angry mob on my hands when you all found out that I had drank all the free beer while sitting in the recliner and switching back and forth between the college hockey and college basketball (which was my default post-run activity this weekend). So, you'll have to deal with the generic titles for now.

Anyhow, what the hell was I going to write about? Oh yeah, running.....well wait, how about the thing I like most about the NCAA hockey tournament. It almost never fails that I end up watching a team play whose school I've either never heard of or is from a school that you wouldn't imagine to have hockey. Two examples are RIT (that would be Rochester Institute of Technology and 99% of you are lying if you say you knew that without the aid of Google) and Alabama-Huntsville. RIT is in the Frozen Four and Alabama-Huntsville, the only team from south of the Mason-Dixon line, qualified for the tourney despite a losing record (they won their conference tournament) but then were summarily ousted by the overall #1 seed, Miami (Ohio, not Florida). What makes college hockey even more interesting this year is the fact that I did not get a single Final Four team correct in my basketball bracket. I woulda been better off making my picks based on who had the cooler mascot.

Okay, between all the basketball and hockey watching, I did actually run some this past week:

Monday - Rest. But I played basketball, so it wasn't full rest. Just rest from running.

Tuesday - 9 miles. I honestly don't really remember much about this run, so it must not have been all that spectacular (or all that horrible, for that matter).

Wednesday - 9 miles with 6x800m. I fully intended to do 8 intervals, but after 3 I could tell that that would be reaching and the last 2 were pretty ugly, so I called er good at 6. It's not like I'm training for a 5K anyhow.

Thursday - 6 miles. I fully intended to do 8 miles, but I absolutely could not resist the urge to try out my new trail shoes (Brooks Cascadia 5) and explore a new trail (Lookout Mtn.) all at the same time (and during my lunch hour). As it turns out, the trail was still under snow (knee deep) in the shadier spots and I ended up losing it a couple of times and wandering aimlessly around the mountain before I picked up the trail again. This slowed my pace significantly (we're talking 11 minute plus here), which meant that I ran up against a time barrier before I got to 8 miles, so I settled for 6.

Friday - 25 miles. The temp was just about perfect for running, but the 20-30 mph winds weren't. I ended up running 4 loops around town to try and stay sheltered from the wind. This actually wasn't as bad mentally as I thought it would be and it allowed me to return to the house and refill my handheld with Perpetuem along the way (which worked well, by the way). I did a run/walk ratio of 10 minutes to 2 minutes, which I think worked much better for me than the 25:5 and 20:4 I experimented with last summer. I didn't really start to feel fatigue set in until about mile 22, but even then it wasn't bad. I also set a new record for taking a leak during a run. Between the 70 ounces of water in my hydration pack (I didn't finish all of it, but close) and the four, 22 ounce bottles of Perpetuem I consumed, I was most definitely hydrated. I ended up stopping to pee 6 times during the run.

Saturday - 15 miles. The goal here was to run the whole way at a pace that felt very easy. Again, it was windy so, again, I had to run loops around town. My legs felt pretty good considering and I ended up with a fairly easy feeling run. I started to feel the accumulated miles at around mile 12, but not horribly so.

Sunday - 7.2 miles. I expected this one to be a very slow recovery paced run, but immediately after starting I could tell my legs had more energy than it seemed like they should after covering 40 miles the previous two days. Instead of the 9 minute/mile pace I was expecting, I fairly easily clocked 8:02 pace.

Total - 71.2 miles

My Lean Horse plan generally follows a "hard, hard, medium, easy" pattern, so after two "hard" weeks, this next one will be a little lower mileage followed by a bigger cutback the following week before the cycle starts all over again.