With taking this week as vacation from work, I thought it might be a nice opportunity to get some extra workouts in, so long as they weren't going to derail my normally scheduled training. My initial fantasy thought was to do a few century rides, but that thought was fleeting, and after Saturday, I decided there was no way it was going to happen. But I am still thinking that I'll do a few extra bike rides - maybe some shorter distance ones in the 40-50 mile range to play around with intervals.
The other thing I've been considering recently is my running training. Those who have been following saw me go through running once/week leading up to the half, then once every two weeks for about a month, followed by adding in a mid-week run for the last four weeks or so. However, that mid-week run made my running schedule three runs every two weeks - as I have been not running at all on weekends when I do long bike rides. As I've pondered the wisdom in the article I mentioned in my last post, and as the weeks go by and I'm now about two months away from the Baystate Marathon, I'm thinking that one option may be to cut back to 50 and 70 mile rides on weekends, which should allow for a run every weekend instead of every other weekend. In other words, I can start squeezing in a 2nd run every week, and I'd have somewhat of a two week cycle of running - a LSD run, a mid-week run, and a 'tweener' that would take place the next weekend along with a bike ride, and the following weeks mid-week run.
So then the question is - what to do with that extra run? I've already got the LSD run covered, and the mid-week runs tend to be threshold pace runs. Adding another threshold pace doesn't seem like it'd reap much of any benefits, so that leaves something like a tempo run, in my mind, as the next option. However, the problem with a tempo run is it's intensity - I have to make sure I don't overdo it and cause excess tightness in my quads that can aggrevate the IT band. I've done real well so far this season with managing that, so if I'm going to go with this tempo run experiment, I have to be prepared to jump ship at the first sign of trouble.
With all that in mind, I decided today would be a good day for this first trial. First of all, I had yesterday as a full rest day, and two very good nights of rest. Second, tonight is my normally scheduled Yoga - so I'll have a chance to stretch out. Third, tomorrow is legs strength day, and I don't want to run and do squats on the same day. Wednesday is the mid-week run, and then I want to leave Thursday and Friday as legs rest because this weekend is another 20 miler. So, today seemed the best option for this run.
The next question is what pace I should be doing this at. I had been toying around with 5 minutes at 8 min/miles during a couple of my mid-week runs, to no ill effect - so I knew I could probably start somewhere around there. What I ended up doing was just initially concentrating on keeping my cadence around 180, and moving at an effort level that was slightly higher than normal - and wherever the pace was, so be it. I was somewhat surprised when I consistently saw my pace reading around 7:40 to 8 min/mile. But I felt like I could maintain that for quite some time. As the run progressed, and I got towards the two mile mark, after maintaining < 8 min/miles, I decided I'd slow up a bit at mile three. I just felt like that was going to be enough - I was in no danger of not being able to finish the full 6 miles, but I just felt like maintaining that pace throughout all 6 miles might end up pushing it too much.
So once I hit three miles, thats what I did - I slowed up a bit to let my HR, which was getting into the 160's, calm down a bit. As it turns out, upon reading about tempo runs when I got back - the timing was perfect. Apparently a common practice to is to tempo runs for about 20 minutes - and with the 3 mile distance I did, I was at tempo for about 23 minutes and change. It also coincided with the part of the loop that starts a gradual uphill, so even though I slowed up to my normal pace of 8:30-8:50 min/mile, my HR stayed in the high 150's and 160's. I was less worried about HR, and more concentrating on making sure my legs were recovering and feeling good, and not feeling like I was stressing them.
The other thing I started paying attention to during this run was breathing. I normally just breath however I breath, without thinking about it, but I decided to try deeper breathing, similar to the pranayama deep breathing from yoga. I ended up finding a 4 breath inhale 4 breath exhale pattern worked pretty well. The only issue I had is that when I was concentrating on that, my concentrating on foot placement and mechanics got a little sloppy - and placement and mechanics is something I pay particular attention to in order to avoid IT band issues. So I found myself bouncing between concentrating on one thing, then the other. But you have to start somewhere.
Overall, this was as fast as I've done that loop. The next fastest time was a few years ago, when I did it in +5 seconds as compared to today. It would barely be worth mentioning, except for the fact that it was right before my IT band issues started - so that naturally has me paranoid in a superstitious way.
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