Weekly Summary: 1/12/09 - 1/18/09 (535 minutes, steady state)

Last Week

There's a lot of overlap with Ian's Week in here.

A second consecutive good week of training. The steady state on Thursday was encouraging. The mountain adventure on Saturday was deeply satisfying, and on top of those I got in four more runs of >=70 minutes.

I haven't been doing much speed, because it's a bit tougher on my body, and I feel like I'm taking close to as much load as is prudent right now. My left foot, left hip, right knee, right achilles tendon, and left upper back muscle all have, at various times, given me just slight hints that they would not be amused by bashing out two hard workouts and a fast long run each week, which is what my lungs and leg muscles might be interested in. I didn't do much core this week, but that was mostly because my back was hurting already, and crunches and bridges and whatnot seemed to stand a good chance of aggravating it further.

For next week, I'm continuing to focus on aerobic stuff and large but comfortable volume. My plan is roughly:

Mon: AM jog, PM easy running, strides, core
Tu: maybe some fartlek
Wed: AM jog, PM easy running, strides, core
Thu: AM jog, easy running, maybe some 200s, 300s, or even a 400 at relaxed pace, long recovery
Fri: steady state with Ian
Sat: recovery, easy, core
Sun: longer run, maybe 1:45

The idea with the fartlek and short intervals isn't to put in strenuous workouts. The training stress here should be from milage and the steady state. Instead, it's more of a freshness and pace-feeling thing. I want to be familiar with faster training paces when it's time actually to train hard at those paces. I'd rather not hit the track for mile repeats at sub-5 pace having not run 800m at that pace in months. I also don't want my legs to get too used to trodding between 6:30 and 8:00 pace all the time. Somewhere in there should be some bits of speed to keep me capable of striding out and turning over when I need it.