Training week five recap
This was my hardest week of training yet. My weekend long runs added up to 24 miles and I did my first serious speed workout on the day after Christmas: running as fast as I could maintain for 5 minutes with a 1 minute rest, repeated 4 times. I ran at the CSU intramural fields. One loop around the light posts is about 4/5 mile. My pace for the intervals was about 7:45 per mile, a bit slow. I blame the cold and holiday excess. I'm going to try to pick it up on my next workout, tomorrow, which will have to be indoors on a treadmill since it's going to be too cold to run outdoors. Indoors, New Year's day, probably not a recipe for record breaking pace, but we'll see.
My family gave me a Garmin Forerunner 35 as a gift. I've enjoyed leaving my phone behind on shorter runs and have been using its heart rate function to modify my long runs. If Garmin's model of my maximum heart rate is correct, I've been going too easily on the flat or downhill sections and too hard on the uphill sections of past runs. On Saturday's long run I flipped this around to keep my heart rate mostly in the 70-80 percent range (lots of D+ meant going over a bit) and increased my overall pace compared to my previous shorter run on the same route. I'm going to continue to try to make my long runs easy, but not too easy, as the miles increase in future weeks.
I didn't do any significant amount of biking last week, but did 50 minutes on an elliptical machine at the gym listening to France Inter programs, and did two one-hour strength and conditioning workouts, one at Become Fit (squats, dead lifts, box steps, etc) and one heated flow yoga class at Raintree. I missed my favorite deep stretch yoga class.
The numbers:
7:55 running time
42.2 miles
3389 feet D+