Boston Training, Week 14

A pretty solid week with a nice scare thrown in for good measure. The weather was great all week and it made the running that much more enjoyable.

Tuesday - 11.2 miles at 8:14 pace. Felt good to pick up the pace just a bit.

Wednesday - 4.2 miles at 9:19 recovery pace. Pretty sore today. Took it easy.

Thursday - 9 mile hill workout at 8:23 pace. This was my first hill workout since the Mill Creek race so I was eager to see how my legs would feel. Everything went great for the first 5 miles and then my piriformis started to bother me. I tried to shake it off and call myself a wimp, etc., but it just kept getting worse. Scared the hell out of me. It was like, "here we go again". So I iced and used The Stick and hoped for the best. The nice thing about the piriformis is that recently, it has healed much faster than it used to. By Friday it was feeling a lot better but I continued treating it anyway. Better safe than sorry.

Saturday - 22 miles at 8:30 pace. This was a good test. The piriformis held up much better than expected and I was able to run pretty strong for the first 16 miles. The last 6 were kind of tough (as they are supposed to be) and I had to keep mentally pushing myself along. My breathing was fine and I kept reminding myself that there was nothing wrong except for general fatigue. So I kept pushing and held the pace until the .5 mile hill during mile 21. Overall, a really good run and a good chance to work on the mental aspects of running late in a race. The pace was comfortable.

Sunday - 3.6 miles at 9:39 recovery pace. Wasn't sure if I was going to go out today and waited until 3pm to finally do so. Legs were very tired so I just took it slow. One more hard week and then the taper begins. It won't be long now.

Oh, they assigned bib numbers this week so that was exciting. I'm # 8440, which means there are well over 8000 runners with faster qualifying times than me. That's what makes it Boston. Exciting and humbling at the same time.