Seeds of Doubt

For whatever reason this week, some self-doubt has crept into my subconscience. I'm not entirely sure why it has chosen this week to invade my psyche, but it's there and all I can do is deal with it. Part of it is probably due to the fact that I didn't PR in my last race, which was the first time that has happened in my last 15 races. I guess I'm used to that little confidence boost that comes with a PR. In reality, I didn't really set myself up to PR in this race, so I really shouldn't let it bother me, but it does.

Secondly, I think I'm getting a little stale in my training. I have gone over 100 miles for 7 straight weeks and 10 out of the last 11 weeks. Doubts are starting to creep in about whether I'm doing the right thing. I've been kind of winging it so far in my training, with the assumption that more is better. During base building, I think that's pretty decent reasoning, however, at some point, I need to get out of base-building and into the more intense stuff. I have no idea when to start to make that adjustment. I'm kind of thinking I'd rather do it too late instead of too early though. I really don't want to peak too early.

So now that I have that off my chest, I did have a decent weekend of running. On Saturday morning, the whole family headed off to the park for some fun in the sun. While the kids played at the park, I did loops around the .4 mile track at the park. What I quickly realized is that with my wife and kids on the infield watching me, I was running way too fast for what should have been a recovery run. After a mile, I checked the split and it was dead on @ 6. Now the plan was to do mile repeats on Sunday, but since I was already into this workout I decided to just ride it out and turned the run into a marathon pace workout. 22 and a 1/2 laps later, I finished the workout with an average pace of 5:57 for the 9 miles. With the warm-up mile it made it 10 for the whole thing. Later in the day I took the kids out for a 7 mile run in the double stroller. Now that Chloe has mastered her training-wheel-equipped bike, it was a little bit of an effort to get her to agree to go in the stroller. Daddy pushing her was so last month. After some amount of reasoning, and maybe just a little bribing, she agreed to humor me and went along for the ride. It was slow and was probably the recovery run that I should have taken this morning.

On Sunday I did 10 miles to cap off the week. It started off very slow, but as the legs adjusted I was able to pick it up as I went along and finished it fairly strong. So for the week, I did 104 miles in 9 runs. The 104 miles ties my career high. I was thinking about adding one more mile onto the end of Sunday's run, just so I could claim the record, but in the end I decided against it. I didn't feel like this week really deserved the title. With no runs done at anything faster than marathon pace, I wanted to save the career high distinction for a more deserving week.

Mon: 10 Miles
Tues: 17 Miles
Wed AM: 10 Miles
Wed PM: 7 Miles
Thur: 10 Miles 8 @ MP
Fri: 23 Miles
Sat AM: 10 Miles 9 @ MP
Sat PM: 7 Miles
Sun: 10 Miles

104 Miles