Week 37, 2012

Another good week.

I was worried about this week, as on Friday I was going for holidays to California and was seriously doubting whether I'll manage to do any running there. So the plan was to try to at least plan 4 workouts before leaving; no time to waste.

On Monday I joined a Sportsworld run. The pace was super relaxed and my heart rate was in the jogging range, so I was happy to see at the end that the average pace was 5:39min/km; sure, not fast, but not sluggishly slow either.

Then on Tuesday intervals on the track: 4 times 2K with a short break in between. My plan was to do it at 4:00min/km. There was a big group with this exact target so I was happy to join them for the ride. We took off and I immediately knew that the pace was far too fast: we did the first 400m in 3:45min/km and I jkeust knew that I won't be able to keep up with that pace. Gladly we slowed after this first lap but we still did the first rep in 3:51min/km and I was wasted by the end of it. The second one was considerably slower, 3:57min/km but I was even more tired at the end of it and struggled to keep up with the group. The 3rd interval was a struggle from the beginning and around the middle of it I stayed behind trailing around 30m behind the group at the end, but I still did 3:56min/km on it. The final one was the coffin to my nail: I lost more than 100m on the group, did 4:04min/km and felt like a failure ;).

When it was time to evaluate the day I had mixed feelings. On one hand I did not manage to keep up with the group, so that sucked big time. I was even thinking that maybe this is why I'm struggling to get good results lately; that maybe it's the inner game that I'm lacking and not the training...

On the other hand it was just one week since I recovered from the injury so maybe I deserved a break. Moreover, I did end up with the average pace of 3:58min/km, so I did meet my target. Oh well.

On Wednesday I did an 18K run. I was planning to make it an easy run and it started as such but on the second half of the run I decided to push it a bit and was doing around 5:00min/km, with the training average of 5:17min/km.

On Thursday, just one day before going to California, I was planning to do my long run. For various reasons I ended up not running at all that day and I was pretty frustrated about that.

Gladly, I did manage to do two trainings while in San Francisco. 17K on Saturday, along the waterfront, with the first half slower (5:06min/km) and the second faster (4:52min/km). And 18K on Sunday: this time I planned to push harder for the whole run, but after a short while I was in a pretty bad shape with chest pains giving me trouble so I had to slow down (my body not used to morning runs? ;) and again I sped up only for the second half of the training but this time I managed to do it at a respectable pace of 4:36min/km.

Funny thing is that on Sunday, while I was running, I saw preparations for a half-marathon race. If only I checked that beforehand then maybe I could get my chance of running a half-marathon before Berlin. Still, it was nice to see all this running-related buzz around.

So, even though I didn't do my long run this week, I did manage to do my 5 planned runs and ended up with 85K total; not bad. Now I only wish that I'll be able to continue in that fashion the following week (doubtful) and then one week of tapering and Berlin! Exciting :)

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