Roller Coaster Training

Last Sunday I ran the Grandma's Minnesota Mile that resulted in a decent time. I then woke up the next morning and did my long run that I had missed because of the race. On Monday I woke up and hit the roads by 0405 and did an out and back on West Skyline. The miles clicked off without any problems and I was feeling like things were on the rise.

For the remainder of the week I battled getting out of bed and running decent mileage. I wanted to run medium long on Thursday and long one more time on Sunday to have a solid week. Neither happened and I managed to take two days off of running. On one of the days off I followed a "egoscue" strength video to loosen up my back and that worked very well.

On Saturday I hooked up with my buddy Rod and we did a near 10 mile pace run for his preparation for a Half-Ironman in three weeks. The run felt very good and I managed to roll out 6:20-6:30 miles without any hesitation or issues. Then on Sunday I woke up with intentions of running for a bit over 2 hours and I was so stiff and sore just the thought of running was far-fetched. After some stretches and self-motivational thoughts I meandered out the door for a pathetic 90 minute run that felt just horrible.

All these feelings and thoughts leave in a very uncomfortable position heading into a 26er. I want to remain as optimistic as possible but I also want to be realistic and be ready for finding a way out of that race come damage time. Really, I guess there is no planning that kind of thing and I will just deal when and if the time arises.

Here is the lame week of training that was:

Monday:

2:05:16 17.5 miles

Tuesday:

0 miles

egoscue video for back and core

Wednesday:

57:23 8.6 miles

(4) steady state: 6:35 warm up

5:55

5:50

5:49

Thursday:

0 miles, sore

Friday:

38:04 5.2 miles

recovery that felt really good

Saturday:

1:05:51 9.8 miles

6:20-6:30 pace

Sunday:

1:32:00 13.2 miles

felt horrible, lot's of abdominal soreness

Weeks Total: 54 miles (5 runs)

Years Total: 1977.7 miles