Sorry I’ve been an absentee blogger. The truth is that I haven’t felt super inspired to write anything for a while, but I know that the longer I take a break from blogging, the harder it’ll be to get back on that writing horse. So, here I am!
It’s been 5 weeks since the Danville 10K, and I’ve got 5 more weeks until my goal half marathon: Brazen Racing’s Summer Breeze on 8/6. To spare you the gory details, I’ll try to recap each week with the basic stats and 1-2 sentences:
- Week of 5/30: 17.25 miles. Recovery week from Danville. I ended the week with a quarter mile “run”. My left hamstring was bugging again. 😦
- Week of 6/6: 25.7 miles. All easy to baby the hamstring.
- Week of 6/13: 33.6 miles. One workout, which was super tough (3 x 2000 m), and my longest run in 4 months (14 miles) – though I had to walk/run the last 4 miles.
- Week of 6/20: 25.9 miles. Traveled to Maryland to visit family and friends. Holy humidity! I ran the Fletcher’s Cove parkrun as my tempo run (perhaps I’ll recap this later).
- Week of 6/27: 25.9 miles. Busted travel plans meant squeezing all of my runs over 3 days. I finally had a decent long run (14 miles) with the last 3 miles at progressively faster paces (10:03, 9:28, 8:52).
I’ve been following a half marathon training plan from You (Only Faster) by Greg McMillan. What attracted me to the book was the idea that you take McMillan’s generic plan and purposely tweak it to suit your own needs. McMillan takes you through how he would alter the training plan depending on whether you’re an “endurance monster”, “speedster”, or combination runner. He also wants you to consider things like recovery time and adaptation periods (i.e., how fast it takes you to build speed and endurance). I selected the half marathon plan that has 4-5 days of running per week. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow McMillan’s advice to sit down in advance and plot out everything, but if I use his marathon training plan for CIM, I will definitely do that. For the time being, I’m kinda taking one workout at a time.
Because my hamstring has been acting up, I’ve been doing 1-2 sessions of strengthening and core exercises a week. It’s not much, but it’s better than zero sessions. 😉 After a long absence, I’ve also gotten back to foam rolling. It turns out that my hamstring feels better after rolling out my ITB. Strange, but true.
I know I still have more than a month to train, but I’m not feeling super optimistic about Summer Breeze. I feel like this past week was the first week of this training cycle that I finally felt OK, but even then, all of my easy runs have been super slow. I hope it’s just my body adjusting to the increase in volume and that the speed will come along eventually after I do a few more sessions. On the brightside, regardless of what happens at Summer Breeze, I know that all of the aerobic base I’m laying down now will pay dividends for CIM. Oh, plus I just signed up for another half marathon! I’m running the Healdsburg Half with Cathryn and Jess in celebration of my 40th (!!) birthday. So, if I don’t PR at Summer Breeze, there’s another opportunity in October.
I’ll end with some photos from the last 5 weeks. Happy 4th of July everyone!
On the Bay Trail near Palo Alto airport
Running is always more fun with friends!
Warming up before the Fletcher’s Cove parkrun
Long run along the C&O canal towpath – humid but pretty!
It was so lush and green on the East Coast
My niece and I about to chow down at a sushi buffet. I ate non-stop while I was in Maryland!
Howdy! My name is Jen and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I like to eat, run, and blog, but not usually at the same time.
Running Tangents 
Great to have you last week. Thank you for making the time to come to visit!
Love, JS
Thanks for having me! xoxo
Love the trail pics! Happy Fourth of July, and here’s to adventures in a new age group (which is another way to say Happy Birthday, heh!!) I’d love to hear how the McMillan book works out for you. I forget – did you review it previously? Was it what you used while you were doing heart-rate training?
Thanks, Grace! I haven’t mentioned the McMillan book before; I just bought it on Kindle last month. I’m hoping to review it after a training cycle. The heart rate training I did was based on articles I read about MAF training.
I notice as the weeks progressed there was less talk about your hamstring =)
Heh, I think by “talk” you mean “whining and complaining”. 😉
[…] Marathon training has gone well. I think that complaining about how poorly everything was going (in my last post) really worked!😉 This week, I managed to do a fast finish run on Tuesday, 2 x 2 mile intervals […]