I felt off today. And this sort of ticked me off. I wanted to feel good. I did not want to feel off because that might mean that I was off because of the effort yesterday. Really, I did not want to have a "tweener" workout yesterday that in turn compromised my effort today. This is a bit of a trap I need to be careful of ... instead of keeping easy days, easy - and hard days hard, the trap is to run all the days in between ... and hard days are not so hard and easy days are not so easy. That does not lend to getting better. And so, I knew in part that my effort was not super hard yesterday and it was not super easy. So I had compromised what I could do today. But I did not want to admit it. Nonetheless, I was hesistant to get out because I knew I'd have to face this reality that I was off because I pushed yesterday but not enough.
But I felt off in other ways, not just from the run. I am dealing with a stomach muscle pain that is slowing me down. I slept like crud. It was cold out. And windy. So I had the excuses lined up in addition to my tactical error from yesterday. I hit the mill again in the afternoon. This too played into my mental state. I did not want to run on the mill again.
But, as things are, as I dug into the mill and the run a bit I stopped feeling sorry for myself and decided to make something of it. I knew I was not fully able to attack this run, but I was not going to just run easy. Maybe this was a tactical mistake too - but mentally, I needed to do something to keep driving progress in my head. So after a four mile warm up (7:15s), I jumped into a classic Carpenter interval workout - 1 minute on, 1 minute off. I did 15 of these at 5 minute per mile pace (I really need to determine how I can crank the mill into kilometer paces) and the rests at 8 minute per mile. The initial intervals brought my HR up to about 160 and then the rest would teeter down to 147. Towards the end, the HR would climb to 168, and then the rest would come in at 150-155. I did not feel strained on any of these, but I knew I was not on top of my game. I did some pace counts for 30 second on the repeats, and these came in at 45-46 (or 90-92 on the minute).
I finished the 10 with a mile cool down, for total time in 66:40.
This is certainly not as good as the workout I did last week with the 800s at 5 minute pace, but it was something. And it worked the turn over a bit. Tommorow I will rest (easy mileage) to get back into a smarter groove. | 