Things be heatin’ up tho. Well, for the first day. Then the weather went nuts and dropped.
This week was the longest running intervals to date with a few more on the horizon before race day. I felt far better on day 2 with the 20 minute run than the other days. The longer interval, followed by a walk, and then another run, feels sluggish for me to get ramped back up to hold the same pace. When I see those plans, I totally understand why they are the way that they are. When I see them, I immediately feel like the focus of the workout is on that second run and being able to not be slower. I didn’t always pull that off, however.
W7/D1
- 5 Min W/U
- 18 Run
- 3 Walk
- 3 Run
- 5 Min Cool Down
W7/D2
- 5 Min W/U
- 20 Min Run
- 5 Min Cool Down
W7/D3
- 5 Min W/U
- 20 Run
- 3 Walk
- 5 Run
- 5 Min Cool Down
On day 3, I did not want to go run. That morning, I went to the gym and didn’t even follow my Juggernaut programming. I just kinda did a few things here and there before coaching. When I got home, it took forever to get motivated to get up and go run. It is obvious by the pace I held that my head and heart were not in it. I was talking to my wife about this and trying to remember the last time that I ran 20 minutes without stopping. Our guess was at least 10 years. Given the state my back and knees are in, running 20 minutes twice last week was a big accomplishment for this old and broken lifter.
Race Predictor
I guess I am going to have to stop looking at this thing because it is starting to depress me. I told myself when I started this that my goal was to just run it without stopping. The very same goal I had when I ran my very first 5K. At that time, I had never run that far before and 3.1 miles seemed like such a tremendous distance to conquer. That distance is no longer daunting to me as it is something I have done many times over. Rather than looking at my training and being proud of sticking to 7 weeks of running, I am beating myself up because I know I won’t be able to run this in the time the race predictor on my watch says. Which is really the worst way to look at any of this.
I have noticed that my VO2 max has dropped, and my guess is that is because the time I am actually running has gotten longer. Garmin thinks my fitness is decreasing, but it is really just getting a more accurate picture since it has more data to work with. Since I log a lot of activities with my watch, I wish the overall snapshot of my fitness calculated by the watch was done based on that and not solely on running VO2 max.
I considered taking a day this week and going to do some interval work, such as run 1 minute and walk a minute and a half again. That was a good workout for me and made me feel good. I was thinking about finding a way to load that into my Garmin and see if I could get notifications on when to run and walk. You’d think this Fenix would do that but I have never set it up so I am not sure.