Last week of training

I haven't been doing a great job of keeping my blog updated and when I get too far behind I forget what some of my runs were or how long they were and I had to reset my watch memory since it was full (I only usually wear my Garmin on my longer runs). I'll just give a quick recap of this past week's workouts.

Monday - 3/29 - Kenyan Way hill workout.

I made it out Monday morning for the hill workout and we did 20 minutes of 200 m repeats up one of the cloverleaf hills followed by a 5 minute break and then one mile hard. I started out easy and my first 200 was 44 seconds, but by the end of the workout I was down to 34 seconds. After the 5 minute break I took off pretty hard up the first hill of the mile. We ran on all 4 cloverleafs (up 2 and down 2) and Sean had measured out a full mile. I was running alone and it was probably the quickest mile I've run since sometime last fall and I finished in 5:17. Obviously I've had much quicker miles, but I was happy with the finish to the workout.

Tuesday 3/30 - 20 mile long run in Conroe

Note to self - 20 mile run on hills on one of warmest days of the spring the day after a hard workout isn't always the smartest idea. I took the afternoon off work and headed up to Conroe to try to do a 24 miler. I set out water and gatorade at a couple of the normal water stop locations and started out. The temperature was around 77 degrees and very sunny. I was feeling pretty good to start and was averaging about 6:55 pace for the first 10 miles, but that was a little too quick for the day. I don't think I did a great job staying hydrated enough before the workout started and this was one of the warmest runs I think I have done all year and big chunks of the run had no shade cover. I also misjudged the distance of a couple of loops that I thought were about 3 miles but ended up being about 4 miles. By the time I got to my water stop at 15 miles I was starting to struggle and had to take a little extra time in the shade. My last couple of miles I fell off the 7:00 pace and was running about 7:30 pace but it was tough. My shirt was just covered in salt and I was dripping sweat everywhere. I took about 5 minutes and ate a whole package of clif shot blocks and drank about 20 oz of water. At that point I decided to just head straight back to the car which was about 5 miles away instead of adding on a couple of extra loops to get to the full 24. By the end of the run I hit my last mile (mostly uphill) in 8:20 and I was toast. I finished the 20 miles in 2:26.

Wednesday 3/31 - Day off recovering from last couple of days

Thursday 4/1 - 8 miles

My legs were still a little tired, but I headed out for an 8 mile run Thursday after work. My left quad muscle was a little tight and I had to stop about 5 minutes into my run and stretch it for a while, but it felt ok after that. I averaged about 7:20 pace for the run and finished in just under 59 minutes

Friday 4/2 - 4.5 miles

Easy day Friday afternoon jogging the "4 the park" race course plus a little extra add on. I ran the 4.5 miles in 33 minutes. We'll see how the race ends up going. I didn't really taper too much for this race and I haven't raced anything under a marathon since Thanksgiving. My goal is to break 22:00 and hopefully be down in the 21:30 range.