I figured I'd combine a few workouts together, since the runstreak days 8, 9 and 10 were short 1-2 mile runs - nothing too exciting.
Today, however, I decided to do a 13 mile long run, which would put me to about 30 miles total for the week. One thing I'm finding is that this runstreak seems to be making it easier to reliably hit mileage goals. Granted, a good portion of the miles could be considered 'junk', as there is only so much that can be accomplished in 1-2 mile jaunts, but that is why I try to focus on form aspects during those runs - so I can get maximum benefit from them. They give me a chance to tweak little things here and there to see how it feels without doing so on a long run when those tweaks may not be advantageous.
The past couple days have been free of any real IT band rubbing, which is good. I think I'm finding that following a race (Half of the Hamptons, Stu's 30k) - I really need about two weeks to recover enough so that the IT band isn't being pushed. I've read about the rule of thumb to give yourself one day of rest per mile of race - and that seems to hold true. That is not to say running isn't possible during that time, but that all miles should be easy, and in my case, maybe limit runs to 5-6 miles for a couple weeks afterwards. So one of the things I wanted to check out for this run was whether the longer distance aggravated the IT band at all - which it did not. Thinking back a couple years ago, I remember after coming out of PT for the IT band, I found that for some period of time after a race (I specifically recall the Webster Lake Tri), my IT band flared up briefly and at the time I didn't know enough to correlate it to anything. All I had to go on was the outside observation of my friend who mentioned that there must be something going on during a race that causes it to flare up. It was later that year that I found the first major clue - too much, too fast. But when I compile everything together, I seem to be noticing a pattern that after a race, I just need some time for things to settle down before I can safely go for any significant distance.
The other reason I wanted to do a 13 mile run today was to get to 30 miles for the week. Since the runstreak helps solidify a weekly mileage volume, I want to build up to 40 miles per week, so that the occasional 20 mile long run becomes a possibility, without it consuming the vast majority of my weekly mileage and resulting in a dramatic mileage drop the following week. Since last week I was at 27.2 miles, 30 miles seemed a reasonable target number for this week. If all holds up, I should be able to reach 40 miles per week by early April. Right now my 'quality' runs are the longer ones - like todays LSD, or the runs earlier this week of 5 and 6 miles that were basically aerobic base building. If I can safely get to 40 miles per week, that opens up the possibility of converting one or two of those runs to a more intense quality run, where I add in a mile or two of intervals or something.
So todays focus was primarily on maintaining form throughout the whole distance. After a couple miles that it seemed to settle into a groove, I tried to make sure my cadence was right around 180 (sometimes it slipped a tad to probably 175 or so), that I wasn't reaching out to plant the foot, leaning forward slightly, and engaging lower abs. A few times in the later miles I found myself slipping a bit, but righted it as soon as I noticed. In the last couple miles, there was one instance where I did a body scan and everything seemed to be in good form - so that is encouraging that I at least had a moment where my mind wandered (as it typically does), but my body stayed in fairly good form.
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