Light at the End of the Tunnel

This has been another tough week of training, but thankfully, the end is in sight. I think I may be butting up close to the edge of overtraining, and if this Sunday wasn't the three-weeks-until-Chicago mark, I'd probably back off things a bit. However, with the taper quickly approaching, I know recovery is on the horizon.

After coming off the marathon paced long run on Sunday, my legs weren't feeling too good on Monday. The schedule called for 10 X 400 in 80 seconds each with a 200 recovery. As much as I wasn't looking forward to fast running, I wasn't really looking forward to slow running either and the change of pace that goes along with intervals seemed to agree with me today. So after another morning of scrubbing the basement and finishing the clean-up, I did the 10 reps in an average of 76 and left feeling better than when I got there. Not a normal recovery day for sure, but it seemed to do the trick.

On Tuesday the schedule called for my 3rd hard day in a row with 3 X 2 mile in 11:00 each. Now, I've done a variation of this workout once before and it was only 2 X 2 mile and it was in 11:20. That workout came a few weeks before my goal spring Marathon and it was a tougher workout than I was expecting. I struggled to hit the pace on both reps, but did finish both in a few seconds under 11:20 each. With this workout adding a rep and paced at 10 seconds per mile faster, I wasn't sure what to expect. Oh yeah, and those legs are still just dragging.

My mind was quickly set at ease as I got through the first mile of the rep. The time said 5:22 and I wasn't working hard at all. I was able to cruise comfortably through the finish of that one and clocked a rather easy 10:47. That was followed with a half mile jog and then I got to work on the second rep. Again, I was pleasantly surprised with how easy the pace felt and again finished in a comfortable 10:46. However, I could tell following the second one that the recovery wasn't going as quickly. I could have used another few minutes to recovery before starting on the final rep, but I stuck to the workout and started up again after a half mile recovery. The last rep was not as comfortable as the first two, but it wasn't bad either. The legs started screaming a bit with 800 to go, but with a half mile to go of a 6 mile workout, that's something I can deal with. I came through the final rep in 10:45. I was pleased with the workout.

Wednesday was a recovery day with runs of 9 and 7 miles at an easy pace. That led up to another tough on Thursday. The plan was to do 10 miles at 102% of race pace. If I calculate race pace out to 5:50 (did I just say that?), that means that 102% of that would be 5:43 or so. Early on Thursday I had thoughts of pushing this workout out one day to give myself an extra day of recovery. I went back and forth about the benefits of doing it today or Friday and hadn't really decided until about 200 meters before it was time to start tempoing (is that a word). I decided I'd give it a go, but call it after 2 miles if things weren't going good. By mile 2, I wasn't fully convinvced that this was gonna be a great run, but I felt good enough to continue so it was on. Splits went like this:

5:48
5:51
5:42
5:41
5:41
5:43
5:47
5:45
5:43
5:30

Overall I was happy with the effort. I am dragging a bit this weekend, as I expected I would be, so I'm happy to be almost done with the hard stuff. Today was two easy runs of 10 and 7. That leaves an easy day tomorrow, and then the final 20+ miler on Sunday. I'm hoping that as the miles start to slowly come down over the next three weeks, the pop will return to my legs. I almost forgot what it feels like to run on fresh legs.