Week 4 - Training

Previous Summaries

The Smart Coach plan has me doing 4 mi, 4 mi, 3 mi, and 4 mi (because it is a back down week)
Hal Higdon's have me doing 3.5 mi, 3.5 mi, 3 mi, 3 mi, and 7 mi (plus lifting)
The other Hal Higdon one has me doing 3.5 mi, 2 mi, 3.5 mi, 40 min cross, and 5 mi

This week I have done 1 mi, 1.5 mi,  3.3 mile (speedwork),  and 5 miles.   See details below.

Monday: I went to the gym with Dave. I did 1 mile on the treadmill with a hill workout. I set the treadmill to 7.5 mph and my time was 8:04 for 1.0 miles. Since I only ran 1 mile, I didn't get too far into the workout but even with what I did run, I could barely tell the hills. Then I lifted weights for my legs. I would have done more but Dave was done.  Then I did 5 minutes of abs.

Tuesday: I went for a 2 mile walk with Dave. It wasn't even fast.  No run for me :(

Wednesday:  Rest day... or actually I was just a big slacker but if I say it was a rest day it makes me seem like less of a slacker. 

Thursday: 1.5 miles on a treadmill... It was awful inside but it was dark. I did a little lifting after. It shouldn't even count but I did a little.  I ran on an incline of 7%. It was extremely hard so then I decided to back down the incline each .25 then back it back up.  I set the speed to 6.6 mph because that's just how I roll not because I had a specific goal in mind.  That's a 9:05 pace normally but with a 7% incline is a 7:13 pace {source}.  No wonder it was so hard.  My total time was 13:39 for the 1.5 miles which comes out to an average pace of 9:06. Half my workout was uphill so that's .75 miles which isn't a lot and probably wouldn't classify as a hill workout.  I definitely needed a good minute into the run at 0% incline to catch my breath from the hill.  I did some weights after.

Friday:  I set out to do 3 miles. Well I was going to do 4 miles but it kept getting later and later and I hadn't had anything to eat or drink yet so I decided to back it down to 3 miles even though I really wanted to do 5 miles. Then I thought I would do 400 repeats like Hal Higdon's program. I thought I had read just 20 minutes earlier that I should do 5.  But I was looking at week 1 for 5. Oops.  The speed work this week should have been a 35 min tempo run. Last week I should have done 6 400 repeats. 

My goal was 2:00 for each 400 because it said to do them at 5k pace and 8 min miles is my 5k pace. It was surprisingly hard to keep that pace.  I made it on all of them. My last 400, I was trying to make it my fastest and clearly that didn't happen.  I tried to make crossing roads happen when I was on my recovery jogs.  I did have to stop the timer twice to wait for the walk sign leaving my apartment complex but that was .13 into the workout and with .13 left. I swear I waited a couple minutes the second time.  That light takes forever, especially when there are on cars waiting.

I find it interesting how speed + recovery is roughly the same as normal speed throughout.  I only have these comparisons for 4 miles or less recently because I haven't been running further. I need to keep this pace for an entire 13.1 miles. This was roughly my pace at my last 10k. This was only 7 seconds slower. 

Saturday:  Rest day again :(

Sunday: I was so exhausted in the morning that I decided I'd sleep in a little and run in the evening. Then evening came and we were still grocery shopping. I still had time to go but then Dave suggested watching a TV show I'd been begging to watch more of so I said I'd run on the treadmill.  Plus it was getting kind of late that it might have been slightly dangerous by the end of the run. 

I knew the treadmill would be boring so I went in with the plan to run 1 mile before getting the remote to turn on the TV. I thought that might break it up.  At 1 mile, I fixed my sock and stretched but did not get the remote since someone else had joined me in the gym.   At mile 2, I decided to find the remote. I walked all around and looked in the corners and finally found it in the drink holder on the treadmill right next to me!  Right near 2.5 miles the treadmill started to go into cooldown mode. I was thoroughly confused. I kept increasing the mph back up and decided to stop it at 2.5 and then just started over.   Before starting to run the 2nd set, I tried to increase the time and couldn't. Later I realized it by default is set to 20 minutes and you have to increase the time while it is going.

For the first .75 of each mile, I set the treadmill to 7.2 mph. For the last .25, I set it to 7.5. I did this throughout. Usually I was a few seconds late at changing the speed because I was writing down my splits.  At 4.25 miles, I threw in an extra one at 7.5 mph.  The last .1 miles was a cooldown at 6.0 mph.

I wanted to run further but for a treadmill run it is pretty good. I added the extra .1 so that it is my longest training run so far. 

Total Miles: 10.91 (Not happy with this)
Total everything else: weights 2 times (well 1.5 since I barely lifted that 1 time), walk 1 time
Total suggested by training plans: 13, 20, or 14.

Final Thoughts:
This was a back down week but I wasn't supposed to back down as much as I did. The only thing I did was run a certain number of times but all runs were short.
The highlight of my training each week seem to be the speed workouts that I never used to do before. I have run on the treadmill more here than in my last 3 months or so in Pittsburgh and the weather is great here!  I'm not progressing on my long run. I need to move it to midweek when Dave is at work.  I've slacked off so long that it might be hard to get my yearly mileage goal in.  I definitely need to get some running buddies.  I looked up some running groups so maybe I'll quit being a chicken and go give one a try.  I really just want to get a 10 mile run in. Maybe I'll do what I did when training for the Philly Marathon and when I had to increase my  mileage, I ran 5 miles continuously and then used Gallaway's method of walk run for the next 5 just to get them under my belt. 

Photo Credit: Paul Meyer Photography (and cropped and edited by me)