Halfway there and making good progress - here's what happened in Week 8!
Sunday 9/24: Planned - Rest / Actual - Rest
After a new week-high mileage PR, this rest day was most welcome. D&D and general getting-back-to-life stuff after vacation, nothing too exciting. Looking over the calendar for the upcoming week, I knew that it was going to be lighter than my previous runs by far, and since we were still in a heat wave and the sun wasn't coming up until later and later, I wasn't complaining. The runs were mixed up a bit from the normal pattern as well, to front-load the harder runs and give the tiniest taper for the race, I suppose.
Monday 9/25: Planned - Intervals: 10 minutes warmup + (4 minutes @ Z4, 1.5 minutes @ Z2) x 4 + 5-10 minutes cooldown / Actual - 10 minutes warmup + (4 minutes @ Z4, 1.5 minutes @ Z2) x 4 + 6:15 cooldown (3.05 miles)
I think this might actually have been my longest training run of the week (other than the 10K on Saturday of course). Since it was quite dark, I pulled on the vest and blinky light I got at the expo on the prior Saturday. I think I'm going to have to make some small adjustments to the vest with pins or something - if I leave it loose the velcro can tear up my shirts, tight enough to not expose any 'hard' velcro is tight enough that it won't sit loosely on my hips, and if I fit it to my waist then the shoulders slide backwards or to either side in a kind of awkward way. Working on this for next week!
Tuesday 9/26: Planned - 30 minutes @ Z2 + 5-10 minutes cooldown / Actual - 30 minutes @ Z2, 12:33 minutes cooldown (2.76 miles)
More fussing with the vest as well as some HR-related nonsense. Not sure if my spibelt was interfering with the readings or what but for a while it kept going down and down at the beginning of my run. Again, nothing too notable on this one as I'm pretty much in a good groove at this point.
Wednesday 9/27: Planned - Threshold run: 10 minutes @ Z2 + 10 minutes @ Z4 + 10 minutes @ Z2 + 5-10 minutes cooldown / Actual - 10 minutes @ Z2 + 10 minutes @ Z4 + 10 minutes @ Z2 + 7:34 cooldown (2.76 miles)
I tried to approach this as a little bit of a warmup for the race itself and it went pretty well. My pace in the Z4 section ended up being pretty close to my 10K pace so I'll try to be mindful of that later on - ideally I'd like to speed it up a bit!
Thursday 9/28: Planned - Rest / Actual - Rest
In the interest of not running my race with sore legs I took another actual rest day here. Planning on going to the gym on the upcoming Sunday rest day (after the race) as a makeup so I don't lose too much in the long-term. It's gonna suck either way, but so it goes!
Friday 9/29: Planned - 20 minutes @ Z2 + 5-10 minutes cooldown / Actual - 30 minutes @ Z2, 9:02 minutes cooldown (2.02 miles)
Kept this one super basic. The good news was that since it was so short, I actually managed to run mostly in the semi-twilight and was able to leave the vest at home! I'm already missing getting to finish my runs at sunrise - finishing in the dark isn't quite as nice so this was a good opportunity to get a little more of out of our dwindling daylight hours.
Saturday 9/30: Planned - Race a 10K! / Actual - Habitat for Humanity 10K - 1:01:50 "official" time/ 1:02:40(ish) per Strava/Garmin (6.21 miles)
I'll write up a full report on this separately, but I did what I set out to do on this one! Based on my 5K from a couple weeks prior I fully expected to beat my old 10K PR of 1:08:23 from Spring 2016 without much trouble. And I did! Knocked at least 6 minutes off it, so I'm super happy.
Weekly Total Time: 3:30:01 (down 3:36:56 from Week 7)
Weekly Total Distance: 16.8 (down 12.8 miles from Week 7)
Weight Lost: A bit, got to a low compared to before vacation but had a couple days at maintenance and some extra PR-adjacent celebratory snacks after the 10K. October is a month of festivities but no reason not to be back at it right away!
Next week: Week 9 starts mixing it up a little bit more with an interesting long run... I've got five weeks until the next 10K (with a fun 5K I don't plan to "race" in the middle) to make progress and compare, and then I'll start seriously thinking about goals for the half. Bring it on!
Comments
Post a Comment