FIRSTish week 4
Well, I’m still with the FIRST plan in spirit, but definitely not in practice this week.
Tuesday: The schedule called for a speed workout, but I was in too much lower back pain from Monday’s racquetball extravaganza to consider any type of workout . I took the day off.
Wednesday: I went to LA Fitness and did 45 minutes of the hill routine on a recumbent bike. I like the hill routine on the Life Fitness bikes because it is somewhat like an interval session (after a few minutes into the workout, the bike alternates 1 minute of higher-intensity fake hills with 1 minute of lower-intensity flat equivalents). I ended up catching up with Nate Powell for a bit who was also on a bike.
Thursday: I hit LA Fitness and did a mile warm up, 5 medium-tempo miles in 34:43 (or 35:49 depending on if I went by the treadmill or footpod data), and then walked for a few minutes to cool down. After scarfing down a bit of my Neato Burrito left over from lunch, I played an hour of racquetball with Mark and Ryan which was a blast. My serve is definitely improving and I’m making less silly errors of not getting back to center court after a shot, but my game still has a long way to go.
Friday: Felt good but took the day off workout-wise (unless you count bowling, which I don’t).
Saturday: I met up with Jon Laman in the morning and we ran for just over 10 miles at a pretty easy pace. We started at City Island, caught the Greenbelt near PennDOT, and then ran back through Harrisburg. It was nice to run with a friend and not be worrying about hitting any specific pace. This was my first time running outside since December 2nd when I ran on the Appalachian Trail with Jon. This clearly wasn’t in the FIRST training plan, but it made me happy.
Sunday: Hit the trusty Conewago trail to do the recommended FIRST long run of 9 miles @ 7:25. I was feeling a tiny bit stiff in my left quad from yesterday so I decided to start with a half-mile warm up before the hard effort. The stiffness faded during the 5:03 warm up, and I started the “official” part of the run. Since I was already a half-mile into the trail I decided to make the long-run effort 9.5 miles so my mile splits would be in sync with the half-mile markers. The first 8 miles clicked by in 7:28, 7:14, 7:12, 7:17, 7:20, 7:15, 7:07, 7:13. I was feeling pretty good with 1.5 miles to go, so I started picking up the pace a little bit, but still felt like there was an extra gear reserve. The 9th mile was in 6:53, and the last half-mile a tiny bit faster at a 6:50 pace.
No question about it, this was by far my best pace/effort ratio for a long run since I started running. Towards the end of the run I was playing with the idea of adding on an extra 3.6 miles to try smashing my half-marathon PR (1:43:55) . Caution won out, and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of getting injured or being too fatigued to have a good workout for a while.
Stats for the 9.5 miles of focused running:
Average pace: 7:12
Average Heart Rate: 163
December 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am
Impressive long run…. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s working. Awesome.