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.
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| 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.
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