Jan 20-Feb 2: Hard Days Very Hard, Easy Days Very Easy

Jan 20
Got a root canal to address the prior tooth & gum infection. Doctor said no running today. Wouldn’t have gone quite so easy yesterday had I known.

Went to the track and cheered on the kids to a great workout. .8 miles jogging back and forth along the track yelling out splits.

Jan 21
Am: 3 miles in 25:40 on CR 210 w/ Tanner.
Pm: 3.89 miles in 28:54 on CR 220. 7:26 pace.

Jan 22
Am: 3 miles in 24:40 on CR 140 & 250 w/ Tanner
Pm: 7.2 miles, including 5 x 5-minute tempo w/ 1-minute rest, with HS kids along the river trail. 7-minute pace uphill into a stiff, 20-mph wind; close to 6-minute pace on the ones heading back.

Jan 23
3.4 miles w/ Tanner on CR 210. Tanner distance PR!

Jan 24
Am: 5 x 300 w/ the track kids. Sprint drills and warmup. Idea was to run the reps at goal mile pace with full rest. Ran 52-high and 53 low on the first four, and then 48 high on the last one for me. Lead kids did 50 high and closed in 45. Good workout.
4.7 with warmup and cooldown
Pm: 3.2 mile dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250

Jan 25
9.2 miles with the kids, starting at the caboose, heading over to cattle yards, up Race Track to Little Rainbow, down 108 and back to the caboose. Methodist Mountain trails were still an icy and treacherous mess.

Jan 26
3.4 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 27
Am: 3 miles dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250
Pm: Feed the cats, followed by (4 minutes @ tempo, 2 minutes rest, 4 x 300 @ 2 mile pace w/ 1 minute rest, 2 minutes rest) x 2
4.2 miles on the track, in a light snowstorm; tempos were at 6:10 pace; 300s were slightly above 5-minute pace for me.

Jan 28
3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 29
Am: 3-mile dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250
Pm: 8.73 in 70:40 on Ute Trail Road with the kids. Nearly 2k of gain and loss on this route, and we started off slow. Last four miles, we were moving.

Jan 30
3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 31
Am: 4 x 8 second max hills on Spiral Drive; 5 x 30 second hard hills on same. Full rest on all. This was a hard workout, and I was getting dropped by the end. My speed is actually sufficient to keep up with most of the kids. My speed endurance on the hardest workouts is not, however.
Pm: 3 miles easy w/ Tanner

Feb 1
Long day. 2 miles easy w/ Tanner on CR 250.

Feb 2
Am: 6.54 aerobic (HR < 150) at Mears Junction, 50:20. Haven’t been doing much running without either the kids or the dog, lately, so it was nice to just have a solid aerobic jog. Roads were icy but never felt dangerous.
Pm: 3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner. 24:20. Dog was moving. I was definitely the weak link on this one.

--

Kind of a weird training cycle right now. I’m training with kids who are aspiring to run sub-4:30 miles and sub-10 3200s, so the running is more intense than I’m accustomed. And we’ve got a dog that desperately needs exercise, so he consumes a lot of my other runs.

Most of my runs thus have two levels of intensity now: very intense and slow recovery. I’m not doing a lot of steady aerobic jogging, because I need to keep the easy days super easy to recover from the 800/mile/tempo workouts we’ve been doing. Early indications are that I’m not losing much on the aerobic front, but I’ve only been doing this for a few week. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

I’m aspiring to run a sub-4:50 1600 this year. That’s an ambitious goal, especially since I haven’t done a sub-5 since 1997, but I’m hitting the early-cycle workouts at that pace. We’ll see if I can keep that momentum going as the workouts progress.