Boston Training, Week 5

The week started out great. The streets around my house were plowed and I was able to do an outdoor tempo run. Beautiful. The rest of the week was terrible. I was forced to run on the treadmill on Wednesday and Thursday, which led to sore shins, as usual. Then I woke up this morning to fresh snow, which I attempted to run through. Enough bitching, here's the week.

Tuesday - 8 miles with 3 mile tempo run. Tempo miles were 7:18, 7:15, 7;13. Felt good to be running hard. Overall pace, 8:14.

Wednesday - 5 mile recovery run on treadmill at 8:57 pace.

Thursday - 9 miles on treadmill at 8:25 pace with 3.6 miles of uphill. Piriformis was pretty sore during this run, most likely a result of Tuesday's tempo run.

Saturday - 5 mile recovery run at 9:44 pace. This was my first run with a heart rate monitor and I tried to follow Pfitzinger's advice and keep my heart rate at 135 or less, to get the maximum out of the recovery run. It was tough to run that slow but managed an average beats per minute of 138.

Sunday - 13 miles at 8:58 pace. Ran the first 5 miles through snow and it was tough. It took a lot out of me, especially trying to run uphill. I decided to double back toward my neighborhood because I knew the snow plows had been through there as I was heading out. I hit the jackpot as the roads around my neighborhood were plowed, salted, and wet but clear. So I basically ran around the block for the next 8 miles, occasionally hitting the hill one street over just to mix things up a bit. I was supposed to run 17 miles today but I bonked around mile 11 and by mile 13 I did the cost/benefit analysis and decided to call it a day. Heart rate average was 145 bpm, which was spot on with what Pfitz suggested. So even though I was running at a slow pace, my body was working the equivalent of my usual 8:20ish pace.

The piriformis is still quite sore, which really sucks because I was really hoping that I was past it. But those damn tempo runs do it to me every time. I'm a little bummed out that I didn't get the 17 miler in this week but better safe than sorry. I still have 13 weeks to go.