Week 2: LR Fail/Workout Win

A confession: I was a naughty little marathoner this week.  I skipped my long run in favor of going to Cape Cod with a bunch of PT girls. Obviously I can't make a habit of this buuuut I have to say it was pretty fantastic to blow off ALL responsibilities [school, running, cleaning the apt, the works] to spend a day sunning on the beach, reading trashy magazines, frolicking in the ocean, and drinking sangria. And since that one day was probably the only real "vacation" I'm going to have all summer I really had to go all out and not spoil it with an early, hot, 14 miles, right? The night before I was all "oh, I'm going to get up at 5am and do it!" Haha riiiight....funny funny joke.  The alarm went off and clearly THAT wasn't happening...maybe someday I can turn myself into an early morning runner, but I just haven't made it there yet.

I feel a little guilty but it's water under the bridge.  Despite skipping the LR I still got in 34.6 which isn't really marathon training mileage, but it's not horrible - had I done the run I would have hit 50, which I plan to do this week.  I did get in an AMAZING workout with GBTC on Tuesday - we did a speedy 3+ mile warmup (think 7:25 pace speedy), followed by 4000m of 300m @ 3K pace, 100@MP, 10 minutes of rest, and then another 2000 m of the same thing.  I actually had a nice little pack of a couple other girls to run with and it was FANTASTIC - we went into the workout hoping to average around 7:15 for the overall pace (including the slow 100s) and wound up with sub-7...a number which I have NEVER seen in a workout over 1 mile reps. Hilariously the first 4K was also technically a 4K PR for me (I'm sure I've run faster ones within my fastest track 5Ks, but still)...granted I haven't run one since high school CC but it still cracked me up a bit - just looking at how far I've come since then.   It was SUPER hard but running with a group was incredibly helpful, I was always motivated to chase the one girl who was just slightly faster. Then we did a relaxed 3+ mile cooldown which was the perfect way to end a 10+ mile day. That was definitely the highlight of my week, and honestly, after doing a workout like that, I feel slightly less bad about skipping the LR.

Nothing else too exciting on the running front this week - the heat has still been pretty unbearable and my schedule has forced me to do several runs in the heat of the day which has just been horrendous. I am leaving my job in a couple of weeks - I feel like it's really cutting into my study time for school and much as I'd love to have the extra money, I'm out here to be going to school, not working, and it's just entirely too much at this point - so that will free up a bunch of nights for some running after the sun goes down which is excellent news for my marathon training anyway.  I did OFFICIALLY register for Baystate on Tuesday - with only 200 spots left I didn't want to take my chances - and of course it was terrifying as always when I hit that "submit" button.  I wonder if I'll ever get to the point where registering for a marathon won't be a huge deal? Probably not.haha.

Hmmm...back to studying the shoulder and wrist complexes...fun times.  I haven't been a very good student along with being mostly a lazy runner this past week...it's time to crack down, hit the books AND the roads!  Have a great Monday!

Oh Hey!

Yes, yes it has been over a month since my last post - yikes! I've just had a LOT going on school wise and barely enough time just to run, let alone to run and blog about said running.  If I'm not posting here and you're just DYING to see what I'm up to training-wise (which all of you are of course, right? haha), I have actually been pretty diligent with posting stuff on DailyMile, it's kind of been my mini blog lately, so I'll occasionally tell a fun tale or two on there.  But hopefully I'll be back to my usual at least once a week-ish posting since school has let up somewhat and of course, because I am BACK IN TRAINING!

Oh yes indeed. This week marked my first week of actual training for Baystate 2010.  Right now, I am rocking and rolling with the "the plan is, there is no plan" plan. And hot damn, I'm liking it.  Obviously to a certain extent I know what kinds of things I want to be doing, where I want my mileage to be at, what sorts of workouts will probably be helpful, etc, and I have a friend who's following the Daniels plan so I'm copying off her workouts a little bit.  But for now anyway, I'm just going with running 6 days a week, doing a workout once or twice a week, whichever suits my fancy, 6-8 miles on the non-workout days [those 12 mile midweek runs will be here soon enough], and long runs on the weekend - duh. It's sort of odd but yet liberating not having my training planned down to the last detail - there were a lot of things I liked about knowing exactly what I had to do on a given day, but in my current life situation [read: grad school] things are going to come up and I just can't be a mindless slave to a training plan.  Plus, so far in my life, "no plan" = 3:39, "plan" = 3:46...no plan's looking pretty good to me right now. :P

Anyway, week 1 has been good.  I finally, finally got out of my 36-40 mile rut that I've been in for the past like month and a half, and got in a solid 48.2 miles, including a long run and 2 workouts.  Combine this with the fact that it got up to 100 degrees in Boston this week and I'm pretty pleased with myself.
Week 1
Mon - 3 miles easy, it was balls hot and I felt physically sick for about an hour after I returned. Lovely!
Tues - 10 x 400 @ 10K pace [7:03] w/ 200 recovery @ 8:00, 3 mile warmup, 1.6 mile cooldown - did this one on the TM/track at BU's GORGEOUS fitness center because this was the day it got up to 100, and I'm pretty sure if I'd tried to do it outside the 400 pace would have more closely resembled MP
Wed - 4.3 miles on the indoor track, tired from the workout and it was still really hot
Thurs - OFF, the BF enticed me with pizza and drinks so...yeah :P
Fri - 2 mile warmup, 3 x 1.5 miles @ tempo pace [7:30], 1.5 mile cooldown - Indoors again, the only time I had to do the workout was mid-afternoon and once again, no way I was doing that in the blazing sun.  Was kinda dragging.
Sat - 7.3 miles in the POURING rain, absolutely fantastic.  It was raining so hard I couldn't even see the other side of the reservoir, the wind was blowing the rain sideways, and when I ran home on Beacon Street there was one point that was pretty much completely flooded out - there were WAVES for goodness sake.  It was ridiculous but I've been dreaming of a rain run ever since this heat wave hit, so it was pretty glorious. :)
Sun - 17!! mile long run
Haha, so this was completely ridiculous. I was planning on doing 14 with my running buddy Kelly and another woman who is also tentatively running Baystate.  I was really whiny at the start of the run because it was hot, but my legs actually felt pretty solid and the heat wasn't bothering me as much as expected, plus we were stopping for water every 20-30 minutes so things were going pretty well.  We got on the Minuteman Trail and headed towards Arlington and at some point apparently missed the turnaround..soooo we may or may not have ended up with a 2:26/17 mile run.  Slightly insane since the longest run I've done in the past 3 months has been 12.5? Possibly. Awesome? YES! My legs were starting to go at the end, but that's pretty much to be expected, and I'm honestly not really sore today at all. Way to start off true training with a bang, right? And then of course I was studying with some friends at Panera later that night, and there was another table of people from our class nearby [we call them the "smart" people...obviously, in a doctorate program EVERYONE is smart, but they're the ones who are like always, always, ALWAYS studying, and for that reason I'm sure they're also the people getting the A's.] I mentioned to someone that I was tired because I woke up at 6:30...they asked why....uh....to run 17 miles.  The other table is like, who ran 17 miles? Yup, that would be me.  One of my friends was like "you know, that doesn't even surprise me anymore"...told you these PT kids were smart . :P

Soooo that's where I'm at right now! I'm happy to have 5 seconds to actually post on this thing, and I FINALLY caught up on my Google Reader [I had like 200 unread posts on there at one point...yeahh...ridiculous] so hopefully I will back around commenting and posting from now on. :)