Fought through some ups and downs this week as I begin to really see the benefit of a training partner - or, more precisely, the difficulties of not having one. I read other's blogs about planning workout strategies with their partners and the pushing and boosts they get when running with someone else and find myself really wishing I had that support during some of my runs. It's great being able to discuss overall training strategy with Veronica since she already has a few marathons finished, but I still put in most of my miles by myself. Maybe in the next training cycle I'll get lucky and find someone training for the local marathon at about the same pace as I'm going...
Started this week a little rough, an easy 9 miler that can be described as anything but easy. For some reason there was a major disconnect between what my legs were telling me and what my Garmin was telling me. I sailed through the first mile thinking I might have been a little quicker than I was supposed to be, only to find out I was significantly slower than target pace. I found myself pushing much more than I felt I should have been just to hit my easy pace targets and my heart rate just wouldn't jump into the normal range. It wasn't that my legs were heavy, just things weren't adding up... It was a weird day...
Luckily I rebounded nicely by destroying my Yasso 800 workout on Wednesday. I even extended the workout it felt so easy and will probably go and change the other 2 Yasso workouts on the schedule to something slightly more challenging. Thursday was an easy run with the HHH (beer included) and Friday was another strong easy run where everything just felt easy and I even squeezed off a marathon pace mile to finish the workout.
Things came falling back to earth on Saturday however as my 17 mile fast finish effort turned into a 16 and change death march. The temperatures were soaring into the upper 80s before I finished the run and my fast finish effort yielded 2 sub 7 miles on the back half before stumbling in the last couple of miles after hitting the wall at about 15 (as opposed to averaging about 6:44 for the last 8 with the last 2 or so around 10k pace...) I tried one of the Razz Cliff Gus that will be on the menu at Chicago and had trouble choking it down without water at 9.5 miles, and despite hitting every water stop on my route (12 in all) I was majorly dehydrated by the time I stumbled in my front door. My only comfort (as self centered as it is) is that Veronica struggled with the long run as well and she already has 5 marathons and a BQ under her belt since she's been living and training in this heat. We'll probably be hitting the roads an hour earlier next week to try to save a few degrees.
The major lesson from this week's long run was that I really can't push distance and pace in these temperatures. My long runs are longer than I've ever run before, my weekly totals are higher than they've been in at least 8 years (if not ever) and I'm still trying to push pace in high 80 degree weather... I'm changing the last 2 FF runs to optional FF (if it's going to be below 80, which seems unlikely) and I'm just going to focus on getting quality miles in. My sub 3 goal for a first Marathon might be too ambitious, but I'm not giving up on it yet, but I need to make sure I don't kill myself or totally destroy my confidence in these long runs... Ah the joy of training in South Florida...
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