Monday, December 20, 2010

Monday is a Bummer

Each Monday not only brings the start of another work week, but more depressing than that it also means that my weekly mileage meter is rolled back to zero. After working all week to add some hard earned kilometres and diligently tracking them both in my training log, on Garmin Connect (when the bloody site isn't experiencing "scheduled maintenance" or just doing its typical crapping out whenever I try and input manual activities), and on the sidebar on this here blog it's not a very nice feeling to have to erase all that hard work and replace is with "0". No fun...

Case in point. For the past week I've been struggling through what was supposed to be a recovery week and not necessarily succeeding. My intent was to go easy, but instead I had some great runs and was not exactly "recovered" come Sunday. Hill running on the treadmill on Tuesday. A decent paced run indoors again on Friday. A few recovery paced short runs sprinkled here and there and I was a bit sore when heading out for my short long run in the falling snow.

Nevertheless, things started off creaky, but quickly loosened up. I found myself running at a decent pace, or what I thought was a decent pace because I didn't check the Garmin at all. It just felt decent. I had decided to keep the long run in the short range and settled on 14km. At the halfway mark I turned for home with a jump in my step and kept chugging along. With about four kilometres left to go what looked like an MMA fighter (or at least someone who might find cauliflower ears attractive) popped out in front of me and proceeded to run just a bit faster than me with an long springy stride that will eventually lead to injury if left uncorrected. Well, that was a challenge of sorts that I could not pass up. I increased my turnover just a touch and my pace quickened enough to keep up with my potentially dangerous and unwitting adversary. It was great! Although I was starting to labour a bit near the end, and long after my foe had stopped, the pace was not that difficult and I likely could have held it a bit longer. In the last kilometre I went even faster and it ended up being at my BQ pace (should the folks at the BAA decide to leave the qualifying standards where they are, though there are lots of hints and pranks around so one can't help but think that where there's smoke there's fire) at 4:35/km (7:22/mile).

Nice! Fourteen kilometres done at an average pace under five minutes per (4:58/km, to be exact, which translates to 7:59/mile). Not bad for me, but not exactly in the recovery range either.

Anyway, the weekly total at the end of the run was a decent 45.5km. I was happy to type that into the sidebar, and to update my monthly (139.5km) and yearly (2248.75km, which is less than three miles shy of 1400) totals. Then, Monday morning came and my 45.5 became a big fat ZERO.

Here we go again...

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1 Comments:

Blogger Nelly said...

awesome about getting into a little duel with the MMA fighter guy, haha It is fun to run and try to chase down people on the trail, even if they have no idea that you are trying to do that! I can't resist the opportunity to try to chase people! haha

December 20, 2010 at 8:52 PM  

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