Week 6: Recovery week

This was supposed to be my recovery week. On Monday I did my usual yoga + gym. But then on Tuesday I still felt tired from the weekend run and decided to take a day off.

On Wednesday I managed to get up at 6am (never easy) and did my hill run on Black Mountain. The day off helped, I was feeling strong and managed to reach the top in 1:00:30 -- that was 4:26 faster than the previous week and so a substantial improvement; it felt great.

Sunset at the Baylands park.

Given that it was a recovery week I decided not to do days with two trainings. I followed up with an easy, recovery run on Thursday, which is when I enjoyed the sunshine at the Baylands park; photo (phone quality I'm afraid) above.

Then on Friday I did my fast 8K run. I started at a good pace, which turned out to be too fast. From then the run was a series of pace adjustments; and unfortunately none of them involved speeding up ;). In the end I missed my PR on this route by 20 seconds.

In the evening of the same day I went for squash and, oh boy, could I feel how tired I was. There were moments when I felt as if I was a small step away from fainting; not exactly an everyday experience for me ;)

On Saturday no run but instead with a group of friends I hiked to Mission Peak. I was a bit hesitant about joining, as I knew this hike very well, having ran it a couple of times before. But I did join and I'm glad I did: nice company and nice weather made for a very enjoyable time. And it gave me a rare opportunity to take my proper camera with me -- click the above photo for more :)

Finally on Sunday I went for my usual long run. This time I picked Fremont Older Open Space Preserve, a park not too far away from home. I did a 20K loop, which was shorter than what I had planned, but again I felt a complete lack of energy during this run.

Afterwards I realized that it's hardly surprising. I needed some rest and this was supposed to be a recovery week. Now, it's true, I only did 4 runs and a total of 64km, which compared to previous weeks sounds like very little indeed. But I did all my hard trainings: hill run and fast run, both "racing", and in the former one substantially improving my best time, and then a long tun to top it all off. So essentially what I had was a regular, hard week, only with one or two recovery runs missing. Finally, I spend almost 14h this week doing sports, an average of 2 hours per day -- hardly a recovery week at all.

So next week I'll try to come back to ~100km mileage, but, I'll either skip the hill or fast run, or at least hold back during one of those runs, not giving it all I have. That's especially important given that on the weekend I'm considering driving to and doing some serious running in Death Valley. I certainly want to do some running there one day, and the following week sounds like a good time to do it. There are few things beyond my control, so I'm not sure whether it'll work out in the end, but let's see.

The week after that I'm planning to run 50K at the Montana Mountain Trail Run and theeeeen, listen up!, I just subscriber for two marathons! -- Los Angeles on 17th of March and then San Francisco on 16th of June. In both cases I'm planning to treat those more as serious trainings than races, probably giving it like 90%, but not going all out. Certainly no attempt to break my PR (not that it was in any danger if I tried...). I guess I'll aim at 3:30 in both cases. Busy times. Stay tuned for post-race write-ups :).

(See more photos from: Baylands Park, Mission Peak, Fremont Older Open Space Reserve).

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