Two Weeks of Workouts, Recapped!

Since I haven’t been racing every single weekend like certain other people, I’m going to give a brief rundown on what I’ve been up to the past couple weeks. Because don’t worry, I haven’t just been sitting on my butt.

Wednesday, April 25th: I went in the morning with Rob for 3x3 miles at a little faster than marathon pace, with 1 mile “float” recovery, which means still done pretty quick. Then we added on another 1.1 miles at the end to get to 13.1 miles, or a half marathon, total. The times were 16:35, 16;40, and 16:48 for the 3 miles, with the recovery miles all right around 6:30. With the last mile in 5:24, we hit a half marathon in 1:15:36. This was a lot tougher than expected, and doing it early in the morning before work didn’t make it seem any easier. But I got the work in without going overboard in terms of effort, and it was nice to have company for a workout.

Saturday, April 28th: For this one, I went solo for 1 mile warmup, then 26.2 miles averaging 6:13 per mile. The pace isn’t super fast, so that part of it isn’t much of a challenge, but obviously the distance is where it gets rough. There’s a lot of debate among various coaches and runners about how far you should go on your longest long runs in training for a marathon, but I subscribe to the belief that the longer you can go (obviously up to a certain point, I won’t be doing any 40 mile runs anytime soon), the better. So that’s why I ran a 2:42:58 marathon, on a hilly route by the house, with only 2 awesome water stops operated by my darling wife. It was pretty warm and humid out, so those water stops were in no way optional - I probably wouldn’t have finished without them. This day also capped off a new mileage record for me: 132 miles in 7 days.

Bringing it home during my marathon of a workout

Wednesday, May 2nd: This was supposed to be an hour fartlek with Rob. Unfortunately a combination of dehyrdation and tired legs did me in after about 20 minutes - I was totally gassed, and it felt like we were going sub 5:30 pace, when in reality we were averaging more like 5:45. After 34 minutes of 1 minute fast, 1 minute slow, I called it a day and ran easy the rest of the way. I had already fallen way behind Rob at that point, and I could tell things were only going to get worse. So it goes - the price of high mileage and hard training is sometimes having a crappy workout, but given how dehydrated I was afterwards, I think that was a big factor. I’ve been religious about getting enough water at work since then, and I’ve been feeling much better.

Saturday, May 5th: As bad as the last one was, this one gave me a little redemption. It was as warm and humid as you’d expect from a San Antonio summer day, but with some more assistance from the aforementioned darling wife, I had a great workout. It went like this: first, 4 miles easy to medium, meaning I started around 7 minute pace but ended around 6:20 pace by the 4th mile. Then after a short bathroom break, it was back to the same hills as last Saturday’s marathon long run for a fartlek of 5 minutes hard, 5 minutes medium. If I had to guess, I’d say the hard efforts ranged from 5:15-5:30 pace, while the medium sections averaged 6:00-6:15 pace. In the end, I covered 16 miles of fartlek in 1:31:42, for an average of 5:43 per mile. A similar workout I did in the fall had me going a little over 15 miles at 5:45 pace, so this was a good indication that even without accounting for the crappy weather I’m in better shape than I was at the same point in my last marathon build up.

Viva la Fiesta Fandango!

This past weekend I ran the Fiesta Fandango 2.6 mile race con mis amigos Caitlin and Rob. Jer sat this one out because he did a pretty long workout earlier in the day. It was a totally different racing experience than what I’m used to. The San Antonio Road Runners put on this amazing event. Picture thousands of people lined up on both sides of the street cheering for you from start to finish! This race takes place literally minutes before the Fiesta Flambeau Parade that runs through downtown San Antonio. It was quite the experience!

Here's a picture of Rob early on that'll help give an example of what the crowd was like

We started off right in front of all the floats and bands that were getting ready to entertain what seemed like half of the San Antonio population. I couldn’t help but smile the entire time because at no point did the noise stop. I was just amazed to see sooooo many people out. The one thing I wasn’t expecting was all the bubbles! Tons of kids had bubbles and blew them towards the racers. At the start roughly 20 high schoolers dashed out in the lead, ahead of Rob (who ended up winning), and I gradually caught each and every one of them to come in third overall.

 

A couple meters from the finish! Yes, that's a boy in a dress behind me : )

The race was at 6:40PM, so it was a little toasty out, but luckily the clouds protected us from the sun. My time was a personal best, because shockingly I’ve never raced that distance before, with a 13:57. I really had no idea what pace that was, I leave the math for Jer, but when I found out I was pretty stoked. I was on low 16:40’s 5k pace, and with a personal best road 5k time of 17:15 set a couple years ago, I was pretty happy. Of course I mapped it out and it came really close to the 2.6 that was advertised...2.588.  Below is a little video from the race!

Things this spring has been a complete 180 compared to last year and I couldn’t be happier. I was dealing with getting my ferritin levels up as well as recovering from a butt injury caused by my clumsy body (tripping myself by getting one foot stuck through the shoelace of the other foot while running).

As Jer mentioned in a previous post I’m getting ready for the US Half Marathon Championships in June, mainly so Jer will have something else to focus on besides his big marathon : ) It’s a little misleading because as far as I know you don’t need a specific qualifying time to participate, but I’m pretty excited to race against some legit women on a gorgeous course. So in the meantime I’ve been getting my mileage back up into the mid 80’s-90’s. But no worries. I’ve decided to continue the clumsy streak and literally did a front flip over my dog last week causing me to lose a day of training because I hurt my bOOty a little too much. Luckily I was still able to get in 84 miles that week so I consider myself pretty fortunate. This week’s training will consist of getting up to about 95 miles, which includes a 13 mile progressive run in which I averaged 6:23 pace (started off at 7:00 and brought it home with a 5:41 last mile) and the infamous alternating 1ks workout. I’ll be doing 11 of those bad boys tomorrow at Incarnate Word since Trinity’s track is getting a HUGE makeover. Here are some photos to show the process thus far..

The old track will be missed..but the cement hard rubber, self draining water pit, and two inch high puddles, that accumulated in multiple spots on the track when it rains, will not.