Sunday, January 13, 2019

Boston Training 2019: Week 5 of 18, Jan 7 - 13, 2019

Week 5's reality illustrated two key potential disruptions of any training plan-- illness and weather.  

Week 5 is the final week in the program of "just running" was laid out like this.













Looked straightforward.   Ha.

On Monday evening, I noticed some drainage in my throat.   I ran early Tuesday but felt worse through the day.   Wednesday and Thursday, I hardly got out of bed, the cold and flu bug was so severe.   Friday, I went back to work and managed an afternoon run.    By the weekend I was close to normal again.

And, then a big snowstorm blew in overnight Friday!   23 consecutive hours of snow, dumping about 8" of heavy, wet snow on us, our first significant snow of the season.   I knew Boston Training would include some snow/cold running but have been lucky so far.   That's done.

So, the actual runs for the week looked like this:

Monday:  Off
Tuesday:  5.3 miles @ 10:47...the head cold was coming on
Wednesday:  scheduled rest day but I was sick anyway
Thursday:  curled up in bed...no training run
Friday:  Rare weekday afternoon run, 5.3 miles @ 10:37
Saturday:  Run on 3" of snow covered paths, 8.1 miles @ 11:19
Sunday:   Run on slick roads, 6.1 miles @ 11:11


I chose to add Thursday's scheduled 4 mile run to Saturday's scheduled 4 mile run and do a single 8 mile run, to get the miles for the week done.   Not sure what the Hansons would say about this but I did it. 

The slower-than-specified paces on Saturday and Sunday ( targeted at 11:00/mile) were due to the sloppy, snowy footing.   I'm not too concerned about this in the days after a snow storm but non-dry pavement will make intervals and tempo runs a lot more difficult next week.   We'll learn as we go here.

Did I mention it was snowing on Saturday??   Here's what the ice looked like on my face after the 8 miles.  



















This was a typical view of Saturday's run...every bit as grey and snowy as this looked.


Next week, the serious training starts.   Intervals, tempo runs, long runs, six days of running.   Hang on.

Persevere.

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