Happy Monday! Hope that you had a fabulous weekend. We had a lot of fun running our first race of this spring season on April 5. It was also a really good learning experience. As much as I wanted to PR (set a personal record for my time in a race), I was forced to realize that I wasn’t in good enough shape to do that yet. Rather than finding this extremely upsetting, I was able to see it as a starting point. I knew that from that race that I really needed to work on hills. I was on track to possibly set a PR in my first mile, but by the time I hit mile two, I knew that that wasn’t going to happen. I was really trying to keep my pace but was not successful. In my training cycle last year leading up to this same 5k, I had been mostly running solo and had managed to get in some hill work heading out to the trail. This year however, my husband and I have been training together, which means more running on the trail. And our trail is a former railroad and very flat. Mile three of the 5k was mostly downhill and I was trying desperately to make up time but I had slowed down too much and wasn’t able to meet my goal. Last year I ran a 25:24 and this year I ran a 26:01. I did feel really strong on that third mile and I think that that can be attributed to all the speedwork we have been incorporating. I was able to go from an 8:53 to an 8:09 on tired legs. It is always nice to see hard work pay off.
If you read the last training post, you know that we decided that we still wanted a half-marathon to be our goal race and we will be running one in June. We will also be doing a tune-up 10k in May when we are one month out from the half-marathon. Setting a half-marathon as our goal means that we will need to work more on endurance and time on our feet versus speed. We need to be able to get our bodies used to running at least two hours at a time, if not more. Our workouts will change in that our speedwork will be focused on longer intervals and we will also be including a long run each week. Something that I am doing this training cycle that I didn’t enforce enough in my last cycle is to make sure to keep easy run days easy. I think that last year at this time I was too focused on my goal that I didn’t stop to make sure I was getting enough rest. I suffered a shin injury in May last year and then again in January of this year. I think that both of these injuries had a lot to do with my overpronation and that I really needed orthotics. However, I do think that some of it was related to needing more rest. This time around our easy days have a prescribed pace and I have to remind myself to reign it in and not push myself to hard. I know that I have to give my muscles adequate time to rest and repair in order for all the work I’m doing to actually show.
We just wrapped our first week of running after our race and I’m happy to say that I got in a five run week, which has been a goal of mine for the last year. After my initial injury in May, I was so scared of reinjuring myself that I wasn’t running very many days a week or doing any specific speedwork. I was mostly running just by how I felt. I think that this was a good plan in general for all around running but not for when I have a specific goal that I want to reach. Make sure to check back next week as I will be going into more details about our strength training program.
