On I went, out of the wood, passing the man leading without knowing I was going to do so. Flip-flap, flip-flap, jog-trot, jog-trot, curnchslap-crunchslap, across the middle of a broad field again, rhythmically running in my greyhound effortless fashion, knowing I had won the race though it wasn't half over, won it if I wanted it, could go on for ten or fifteen or twenty miles if I had to and drop dead at the finish of it, which would be the same, in the end, as living an honest life like the governor wanted me to. -Alan Sillitoe, "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

Friday, April 2, 2010

Week in Review: What went wrong?

Every Friday, or when I remember to do it, I'm going to review what I did during the week and figure out how I could have done a better job of it.  It's a fine line between reviewing my week and beating myself up, I know, but I rather suspect patterns will emerge.  Identifying those patterns might help avoid pitfalls, right?

So.  What did we have going on this week?

  • Saturday: the GWB run.  Not as long as I would have liked (I ran out of time, in my haste to catch my bus to DC).  Not as hard as I would have liked, since I didn't know what I was up against.  Rolling hills. 6.8m.
  • Sunday: Slept in.  Also did not run on Monday.
  • Tuesday: This was a mess-up.  I had a 5m hill workout planned and a spin class, but it got truncated to 3m hill + spinning.  The run and the spin class in immediate succession were too much.  I wonder if I should have not shortened my run and foregone the spin class.  I'm okay if I do one in the morning, one in the evening, but going back-to-back, I could tell that I had two mediocre workouts, to a detrimental effect, instead of one strong one.
  • Wednesday:  5m with the Lululemon people again, sort of - I was pretty much running alone.  Yet again I was the weakest link, even though I was running hard (for me).  Possibly too hard,  since Tuesday felt like a hard day.  Lower loop of Central Park, twice.
  • Thursday:  Nice, easy 4.5m along Hudson River - but on legs that felt deader than they deserved to.
  • Friday: Rest for Scotland Run 10k tomorrow.  I have no predictions for that.  If I use my half time, McMillan spits out 1:06.  If I use my 10m time, McMillan spits out 1:03.  My last 10k was 1:05:28 in December, and I feel like I've improved since then.  We'll see.  Reasons why I might be slow tomorrow:  There will be crowds.  The race is capped at 10k runners, and even though they haven't met their cap yet, last year my corral at the start was ~.4m from the start.  Reasons why I might be okay tomorrow:  There will be bagpipers.

So what did I learn this week?  I think I have to put more care into what workouts I do when.  That sounds silly, since my mileage for this week (at a whopping 18m) was not exactly high.  Still, I could tell I pushed it in the middle of the week, and moving the hill/spin combo away from the harder Lululemon run may have helped me feel better.

1 comment:

  1. As a corollary, you could also do "What went right?"!

    I too come up with "Reasons why I might be slow" before races -- having some built-in justifications calms those pre-race nerves. (:

    ReplyDelete