Week 3 was a disaster and Week 4 was my attempt to get back on track. I’m proud to announce Week 5 was a success! Despite rearranging the training plan completely AND going out of town, I managed to hit the prescribed mileage.

A quick recap:
Monday 4 miles, road
Tuesday 8 miles, road
Wednesday 5 miles, Lakewalk
Thursday 3.6 miles, paved trail
Friday 3.4 miles, trail
Saturday rest
Sunday 4 miles, road
Total: 28 miles!

I already discussed a couple of the runs from earlier in the week. I’m not exactly sure how long my Lakewalk run was, as I didn’t start my watch until I was a few tenths of a mile into the run. My watch registered 4.72 miles, and I am pretty certain I ran at least 0.2 miles before I realized I hadn’t started my watch, so I called it 5 miles.

Thursday I cheated badly. I was on a time crunch because I didn’t get up in time to run before we drove down to the Twin Cities, so I had to run after we got there and before we went to dinner. I was going to run 2 miles along the path around Medicine Lake, then turn around and run 2 miles back. The actual path that goes around the lake is apparently harder to find than I thought, so I ended up having to take a convoluted path to even get to 3.6 miles. I was really booking it for most of the run because I knew I needed to get home quickly. I ended up with splits of 13:27, 14:16, 14:30, and a 13:14 pace for the last 0.6 miles, with an average heart rate of 170 bpm. Oops.

Sunday’s run sucked. It was cold (31 degrees F) and I felt crappy. I hadn’t slept well the night before and I was feeling basically hung over without having imbibed, and then I sat in the car for a couple hours. But I ran anyway, so hooray. I felt vaguely nauseated, so I didn’t push at all and probably walked about a third of the four miles (the uphill parts). I felt a lot better during the last mile or so of the run, so I’m glad I got out and did it, since I’m trying to train my stomach to handle running better. So far so good.

Next week includes a hill workout, medium effort run, and a 9 mile long run. And school. Goody.