Week 8 Drawing to a Close

Yesterday, had exactly one hour to run before I had to jet home to get Bailey to ballet.  So I didn't get the 8 miles I wanted.  I thought about trying to tack on a 3-mile easy run later in the evening, but never got around to it. 

What I wound up doing was just a touch under 7 miles on the treadmill. I kept a pretty quick pace for latter 50 minutes, but I put myself in a hole with the 10 minute warm up.  It's unavoidable since I simply can't run well without a good warm up.   10 minutes, minimum, can make all the difference, and not just in terms of the quality of the run but in avoiding injury.  I try to section off that warm up period so that it doesn't factor into my pace calculations, but due to my time constraint I had to blend seamlessly from warm up to run.

I did the first half of the La Jolla half marathon profile again, presenting myself with the sets of notable grades between the start at the racetrack and the leveling out on the Torrey Pines bluff.  I tried to vary my pace a little rather than let the treadmill dictate a constant speed.  I tried out various "Fartlek-like" segments of bursts and recoveries.  I left the heart monitor in my bag and intentionally worked on gauging my exertion through feel.  I really need to work on that.  I think I become reliant on the monitor to tell me how I should be feeling it and I'd like to wean myself off of that.

It was a good, solid session -- for a treadmill run -- and a little on the tempo-ish side actually.  I had figured on a marathon pace run but with the time constraint, I tried to pack in a little more distance and wound up feeling like I was racing a little.  It was okay.  I probably haven't been pressing my pace as often as I should.

This morning, I took advantage of the open track at the school to do some 880 intervals.  I managed to get 6 in, all under my Yasso target of 3:30.  The sixth was my slowest and that still was under 3:30.  With the warmup and recovery intervals, I tallied 5 miles in about 40 minutes...again without reliance on the heart monitor.  Good session.

I have planned another mile swim today followed by a few sets of upper body circuits.  It'll depend on whether or not I can get away from work before driving home to try to catch the evening NCAA tournament games.  If I can get that done, I'll be quite pleased.

The weekend calls for no long run.  I think I'm going to do the 10-mile lap around Del Sur and do some hill intervals somewhere.  If I can get out to Torrey Pines early enough, I might give the big hill there a few climbs to try to demystify it a little.  We'll see.

The main goal this weekend is to really clean out the house, the garage and the yard while the rest of the family is away.