Could be Worse

After a pretty rough week of running through a cold, I had a fun but tough race to close out the week. Dances with Dirt is a 60 mile off-road relay race that is split up between 5 team members. I was assigned 3 legs of distances at 7, 4.5, and 4.25. All legs were moderately hilly, with the second leg having a water crossing and about a half mile of running through mud pits that could suck you in chest deep. Big fun. I managed a 6:13 pace on leg1, and a 6:33 pace on leg 3. Leg 4 was untimed since I didn't dare wear the Garmin through the mudpits. Our team managed a 10th place finish overall(out of about 400 teams) which was great, considering we went into the race with no expectations of being anywhere near the front of the pack.

Sunday left me sore and tired, so I took the day off. Yesterday was a slow recovery and that left me with my choice of a workout to do today. I have a 6 mile tempo and a pyramid workout scheduled for the weekdays this week and then a long marathon paced run for the weekend. With the marathon less than 5 weeks ago, I'm at the point in my training, where I need to be nailing my tempo runs. Tempo runs give me a lot of confidence, and for me they seem to bring my fitness together. With that in mind, I opted to do the pyramid workout today, thinking that if the legs weren't fully recovered from the schock and awe of Dances with Dirt, I'd rather tank on the pyramid than the tempo run.

The workout was 200-400-800-1200-1600, 1600-1200-800-400-200. Things stayed together pretty good on the way up with times of 34 (200), 72(400), 2:28 (800), 3:47 (1200), 5:06 (1600), but things got noticably more difficult on the way down. The legs were pretty much gone. If I can take comfort in anything, it was that the lungs weren't in too much distress it was just the legs weren't there. Coming down the times went like this: 5:12 (1600), 3:55 (1200), 2:36 (800), 76 (400), 34 (200). Not horrible, but definitely some fading going on there. Overall the average for the 5 miles of repeats (excluding the 200s which were really done more as a warmup and cooldown) was 5:06. While I'd have liked to be stronger during that second half, sometimes you just need to survive workouts like this. Hopefully with an easy day tomorrow, I can come back strong for the tempo run on Thursday.