I decided I needed to give the treadmill a hard work out now that it is fixed and at the same time see if I could break my mental barrier that I seem to have developed over the past couple weeks. With just over 5 weeks to go before our travel day for the Goofy Challenge in January I need to get back on the speed work (and also assess where I am in regards to endurance at higher speeds after a few weeks of essentially training myself to run slower than normal outside due to the rough road conditions – snow and ice).
I hammered several 30 second periods at 10 mph and even one or 2 1 minute periods. I only had 3 minutes of walking total and had several minutes at 7, 7.5, 8 and 9 mph. In the end I did my 5 miles in 36:59 which was a very good time overall. I did notice however that I couldn’t sustain the higher speeds for the same length of time I could back in October when I was pushing for a new PR on the half distance. There are a few things that could account for that – as I have been increasing the distance of the long runs I have been slowing them down to make sure I don’t bonk plus over the past few weeks without the treadmill available I have moved to running even my shorter runs outside. With the snow and ice we have here now I have not been able to train the speed as well outside for fear of injury. Basically since mid October I have been training myself to run slower and slower.
So now I need to counteract that in 5 weeks or less…if I am in worse physical condition that may not be enough time to recover but if it is at least partly mental I should be able to spring back pretty quickly.
To accomplish this I am going to push my speed and hill interval days very hard from here on out to see how quickly I can recover. Mid length runs on Wednesdays will have to be pushed pretty hard as well but focussed on sustaining the faster speeds for longer periods (instead of interval style runs). Weekend mid length and long slow runs will be done outside (weather permitting) as I think actually pounding the pavement will help train the mental game for the Goofy Challenge better. But if I see the weekday treadmill runs aren’t having as much impact as I would like I will be looking at moving the Saturday mid length runs inside to the treadmill to help train sustaining faster paces for longer periods. If that still isn’t working well enough (of if the weather gets truly nasty) I will be looking at maybe splitting the Sunday runs into half outside / half treadmill. This would have the benefit of less frozen skin plus more speed work while reducing the monotony of trying to do 20 miles on a treadmill (I have done it before but it does wear on the mind).
So in short – good re-introduction to speed work tonight but I have regressed and need to up my game.
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