Baby Steps

Well, apparently blogging is the cool thing to do, so I am going to try to jump onto the bandwagon and see what happens.

Two weeks ago, I opened up the race season with a 5K, at the Spectrum Irish Jig.  After a disappointing 15:52 finish, I decided that my legs needed a rest, so I did my own thing all week and skipped out on the weekly workout.  Basically, I just ran how I felt, and tried to run some strides and a few 200s during the week.  On Sunday, Scott convinced me to run 21 miles with him, which although I was reluctant to the idea, it was something that I needed to get done and it kind of got the ball rolling in the right direction.

After taking a down week, I bounced back reasonably well.  On Tuesday I ran 8x1600 with 400 meter jog rest, averaging about 5:04 pace for each 1600.  The rest of the week was pretty standard, 8 to 10 mile runs at around 6:10 to 6:30 pace.  On Saturday, I toed the line at the Meteor 10K with pretty legs that were a little tired, but not too bad.  I ended up running 32:17, which is actually an official 10k road pr, ignoring the 31:20 leg that I ran at Hood to Coast last year, and even though it wasn't what I wanted, I will take it since it was an improvement from my last race.  My splits were 5:02, 5:06, 5:12, 5:15, 5:20, 5:15.  Really, I think that I just got lazy in the middle of the race and I don't feel like I quite have that race mentality yet.

The week was capped off with an 18 miler at 6:09 pace.  I did not look at the watch the entire run, and was surprised that the pace was as quick as it was.  Hopefully that means that my fitness is starting to get to where it needs to be.  The 84.5 miles this week is the highest that I have ran since before my marathon, and hopefully I can soon be in the 90-100 mile range.  This upcoming week, we are going to do some shorter intervals, on the Tuesday night workout, so the legs should be fresher going into the Shamrock Shuffle next Sunday.  There will be a lot of competition in Chicago, and it will be a good opportunity to take some more baby steps forward.