A light week to wrap up the training cycle.

Monday: 4 mi, road
Tuesday: 4.5 mi, road, 5×400 intervals (I have no data for this since my power cord for my watch no longer works for downloading information)
Wednesday: 3 mi, road + trails
Thursday: rest
Friday: 5 mi, race
Saturday: rest/recovery
Sunday: 5 mi, trail
Total: 21.5

The race sucked, as I already discussed. I am disappointed still, but I also think it was a learning experience. Sometimes races just suck. New runners tend to make a lot of progress fairly quickly, setting PR after PR after PR. While this was a PR technically, because I haven’t run a 5 mile race before, it was well off the pace I expected. It was even 14 seconds slower than my sandbagging goal. I need to work on endurance, it seems, although I thought I had. I just find it hard to blame the heat entirely.

My training was nice and light this week, which felt weird. I did do yoga several times, which I didn’t log, so I’ll just guess I did it… 5 days? Maybe 4? I did my intervals on Park Point on Tuesday, just to check out the course (not that I haven’t run there before), but of course on Tuesday it was in the high 60s when I ran, so I felt amazing and was flying. Then I stood on the beach barefoot and got soaked by the waves.

If there hadn’t been a rip current, I’d have been in that water swimming, clothes and all.

I probably could have run Saturday, but it was hot again and I was feeling lazy, so I recovered. Sunday I hit the Superior Hiking Trail, starting at Spirit Mountain. It was rough, very hot, and there was a long, steep uphill in the first half mile, so steep that it required stairs. Lots of them. And then I turned a corner and there were more stairs. Sigh. I “ran” pretty slowly, with lots of power hiking, and tried to prevent myself from getting winded or overheated. I carried both of my handhelds, one with sports drink and one with water, and finished off all the sports drink (drank this first since warm water is much more palatable and I wanted the water available in case I wanted to douse myself) and about half of the water. I also ate a Clif bar when I got back into my car. I probably ate it too fast because I felt sort of weird on the way home. Not nauseated, per se, just… off. The heat didn’t help, I’m sure.

Even though my race result was disappointing, I am still pretty pleased with the training cycle. I KNOW I am a better, stronger runner than I was at the onset, and I set a 5K PR along the way. I stuck to the training for the most part, but I was flexible when I needed to be. This upcoming week is going to be kind of haphazard, kind of running by feel, and then I’m jumping into another training cycle. (I ran a 5 mile race, slowly. I think a week off from training is sufficient.)