Week 9, 2012

Recovery week

As I wrote last week this was supposed to be a recovery week. However, it started with the AV'23 track training and I certainly didn't want to miss that one. I was still extremely tired -- not very surprising given that I ended the previous week with a 35K long run followed immediately with an 8K cross race. So my legs felt very heavy on Tuesday. I tried to go easy during the drills and then for the interval part we were doing 5 laps of 400m with 200m recovery jog, then 4 laps faster and all the way down to 1. Funnily my legs would complain a lot if I was going too fast but if only I slowed down a bit things seemed to be ok. I started 5 laps with 4:22 min/km, only managed to keep the same pace for the following 4, but then managed to speed up a bit clocking 4:17, then 4:06 and finally 3:40. I ended up being exhausted but managed to stay clear from injuring myself and was rather pleased with that.

The following day I had to pay the price however -- I simply wasn't able to do even an easy run with SportsWorld and had to take a day off. My hamstrings were giving me hell, but the funny thing is that before it used to be mainly the left one, which I also associated with an injury that I had many years ago; this time however the right one was hurting me as much and possibly even more. To stay true to my word on Thursday and Friday I only did easy, short runs and I could quite clearly see the recovery kicking in: on Friday I had the same average HR but was going more than 20 seconds per kilometer faster. I finished off with a 26K long run on Sunday, which was nice to see the improvements I was making lately: I did the same distance with the same average pace 3 weeks ago, but this time my average HR was 137, not 146 -- huge difference.

I didn't register before for the CPC half-marathon as I didn't know whether I'd be around and now it's fully booked, so it looks like I'll have to find another race as a warm-up for Paris :).

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