Weekly Summary: 2/11/08 - 2/16/08 (race, steady state, fartlek, long run)

It was a fantastic week of running. My race on Saturday was better than I had hoped and proved my fitness is slightly higher than I realized. I'm feeling fit, healthy, energized and psyched up about running.

I began a more regimented approach to training this week. I'm still searching for the balance between leaving myself freedom to adapt to each individual day, and providing enough structure that I don't dick around too much and run useless workouts.

I'm trying to make it so that I know ahead of time the main idea for what I want to accomplish that day, while the details of how I go about getting it done I decide on the fly.
For example, I'm planning on doing fartlek on Thursdays from now until the 10,000 at the distance carnival.

So I knew all week that I'd do fartlek on Thursday, but didn't decide to do 8x3on 1off alone at Lacy until Thursday afternoon. I think this is about the right approach, because I don't waste mental energy trying to decide how to mess around with my schedule, but I don't feel pressure to perform a specific workout a specific way or compare it to the previous week.

I've gone further to both extremes - at times planning the details of my workouts in advance, and more recently just making a checklist in my head of the things I want to get done over the course of the week and doing them however was convenient. If the 10,000 goes well, it'll be good evidence to my mind that my current level of organization is just about right. To be more specific, here's my plan for next week:

Mon: steady state, longer than last week; core workout
Tu: recovery jog, lift weights
Wed: long run 95 minutes, with strides
Thu: fartlek, then about 1 mile worth of track between mile and 3k race pace
Fri: recovery jog, strides, core workout
Sat: 12x800 @ 2:30, 200j rest; about 800m worth of speed work
Sun: NFTC

So Saturday is pretty well planned out because it's my key workout for the week, and I want to use it to work on being familiar, comfortable, and relaxed at goal 10K pace. The rest of the week is set up as far as the goal of what I want to accomplish, but with some room for improvisation.