Last night I made sure to spend some solid time stretching out - Monday is my normal yoga day, and with travelling, that wasn't going to happen. However I could at least make sure I hit the major spots - hips, quads, etc.
One thing that I'm finding about this runstreak - it's a double edged sword in terms of mileage. On one hand, if I were running three days per week previously, if I wanted to do something like a longer run (15-20 miles), I could do so with only a small amount of planning - mostly, that I was recovered from any previous long run, and would have time to recover after said planned long run. On the other hand, it did make consistent mileage week to week somewhat difficult. So, with running every day, it is easier to hit consistent mileage week to week (even at like 2 miles on what'd normally be a non-quality day, that ends up being 8-10 miles by the end of the week), however long run planning requires more effort. It may be that with daily running, the expectations of what constitutes a long run has to change as well, and that is where you get into various rules of the long run being no more than 30% weekly mileage, etc. In other words - if running daily, it may necessitate backing off the long run distances of more than 13 miles for a bit until I hit something in the 40 mile/week range.
Regardless, I was planning on not really paying a lot of attention to long runs until the 2 months or so prior to July, when they'd be the only real quality run workout anyway. So it doesn't really impact my progress of training.
Anyhow - that was all a prelude to say I was thinking about this weeks mileage totals. With last week being 27.2 miles, I'd like to hit somewhere around 30 miles this week. Since I'm travelling until Thursday, and I don't want to do a huge-long run on Saturday to make up lost time - it became apparent that I'd need to do a few medium distance runs. If I did six today, that'd put me at about 13 total for the week, add another six between W, Th and F for a total of 19, and that puts me at needing around 11 or so on Saturday - which ends up being ~30%. Perfect.
During todays six, I ended up dividing it into two parts - the first part I was trying to make sure to go as slow as my easy pace dictates (about 8:45 min/mile), something I've cheated on during the short runs recently. I also tried to pay attention to left foot placement to see if I could discern any difference in subtle changes, in an effort to keep from feeling the IT band from rubbing. On the way back, I paid attention primarily to cadence - making sure I was at 180. And not just checking once, adjusting to hit 180, and then assuming it's good from there on out - I checked several times to help keep my ears (and the rhythm they were hearing) honest. What I found was that my foot seemed to plant a tad earlier - so it may be that instead of paying attention to foot placement to find the proper spot directly, I should just let cadence take care of it. I had noticed in the past that with a higher turnover, the stride shortens (obviously), but this time it was more like extra-fine tuning instead of coarse tuning that occurred previously. I also noticed the IT band rubbing feeling going away a bit. Could have just been my interpretation for all I know - but I do suspect that I tend to slow my cadence just slightly over the course of a longer run (probably down to something like 170) - so if I pay attention to cadence for a while, it can't hurt.
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