Week in Review – w/c 6/4/12

And after last week’s step-down week, it was good to step things back up again. Here’s the review:

• Monday – “zapped the zero” with a sluggish 4 miles. Took a while to get going, but it was a great morning for a run. Also ran another easy 8 at mid-day with no watch or GPS.
• Tuesday – started the day with a steady 4 mile morning run, and followed up with a very relaxed 10 miler after work. Average heart rate was just 123bpm which seemed very low.
• Wednesday – 5 miles pre-work to celebrate National Running Day, with a solid 8 miler later in the day. The 8 miler consisted of 5 x 1/2 mile “on” followed by 5 x 1/2 “off”. Nice to see the “ons” getting slightly quicker each week. Progress, eh? [Splits: 2:57 2:50 2:50 2:48 2:48 and 2:42]
• Thursday – enjoyed logging a few miles in the New Balance MR00s before starting work, and then ran a speedier 8 miler during lunch. The daily doubles started to take their toll though – legs definitely felt tired towards the end of the run.
• Friday – started the day with my usual couple of miles to Starbucks for an oatmeal & coffee breakfast, and decided to just run a lunch time 5 miles instead of something longer.
• Saturday – fun day at the races! Ran the local OK5K and enjoyed a solid 3rd place finish on the fun, but slightly challenging, mixed terrain course. Mileage for the day was just over 7 with the easy warm up/cool down.
• Sunday – the return of the 20 miler! Hard to believe my last 20 mile training run was way back at the end of January. I’ve been stuck on 12 and 13 mile “long” runs for a quite a while, but with the OSS/CIA 50 Mile Night Run right around the corner, I needed to test my mind and legs and make sure they were still capable of handling a bit of distance. The run to Final Kick Sport from the house went well with no major issues, although I did experience a bit of groin/glute pain again in the latter miles. The average pace for the 20 miles was just under 7:20/mile – not a bad effort and definitely something to build on in the summer months.

Generally it felt good to increase my weekly mileage to 87 (highest of the year so far), and in doing so I sneaked by the 1,000 miles in 2012 too. I’m still almost 400 miles behind where I was this time last year, but being out injured for weeks will do that to the training log I guess. Need to pay attention to the groin thing over the next couple of weeks, and if things are less than 100%, I’m starting to question how sensible it would be to attempt the 50 Miler. I’m leaning towards having a solid summer of training/racing rather than risk a re-injury and ending up where I was back in the middle of February. We’ll see….