"Hope for the best, expect the worst" and other musings from an eternal optimist

Runs

Last week

Saturday - 4 miles
Sunday - 20 miles - 8:46/pace

Last week: 49 miles

This week

Monday - Rest
Tuesday - 5 miles with 5x600 at 6-6:30 pace on the treadmill. Evening flight to Minneapolis
Wed - 3 miles on the hotel treadmill, evening flight back to Chicago
Thursday - rest. Evenign flight to Boston
Friday - 10K
Saturday - Rest. Evening flight back to Chicago.
Sunday - 16 miles

Total - 30.2


I do not travel for a living and am very thankful for that. I do not enjoy living out of a suitcase, eating out and sitting in a hotel room. This week was a heavy travel week for me with two business trips. It threw my workouts for a loop, but I got most of the miles in. My 16 miler was about as good a run as I have had in a while. I'm paying for it today with some right shin/calf pain.

I may take several days off in the next two weeks to let this heal again before destroying it on October 22nd. I'm going by the adage of "It's better to be undertrained, than overtrained" and that there is nothing I will be doing now that will significantly impact my performance in a positive way. All I can do is show up hurt if I don't give my legs soe R & R. I think I will do some biking to keep up some aerobic fitness and run sparingly.


I had high hopes of a BQ this year. I don't know where teh confidence went. I think it went away once I started getting injured. I have been able to keep up a majority of the mileage and I haven't skipped many of the key workouts. But I was much more confident last yer with less mileage and regular structured speedwork. This year has been much more solitary. Few group runs. Slower long runs. No formal speedwork. Lots of "pseudo-speedwork" with strides, 5x600s, 5x1000s, 5x1200s. Several MP runs mixed into a long run. What I feel I have missed most is the tempo runs. When I did speedwork last year, usually once a month, we had a tempo run. I have seen the Pfitz plan work for others and I am not convinced it won't work for me, but I do not have the confidence I had with my other training programs.

At this point, for the next 2 weeks I'm hoping for a recovery of my leg and to catch lighting in a bottle, to use a sports cliche', that I really don't understand. I think I can get close to last years time of 3:31, but if my leg hurts, I'm not sure I can hit 3:15.