Alrighty – a few days late here but time for a quick recap of week #5 of Dopey Challenge training.
So this was a bit of an odd week. The plan was 4-7-4-7-14 and started the week struggling.
I did the 4 mile run Tuesday without any real issue but it was a slower run for sure.
Then on Wednesday, I just couldn’t run – my ankle was messed up and running for 7 miles didn’t seem very smart. So instead I did a mile with the dogs, which felt pretty good. But I did get feel some shots in my ankle even in that single mile that says not doing the 7 miler was smart.
So then on Thursday I tried to do some running after we got home from the kids’ swimming lessons but the ankle still wasn’t happy. I ended up with 2 miles of walking which really seemed to help.
This led me into Friday being down a total of 8 miles already for the week!
Because the ankle was feeling surprisingly better I decided to try for my missed 7 mile run and if I couldn’t do it at least I would hope for the missed 4. But I got the 7 done in the end with no issues and in a decent time (for my current conditioning level that is).
I figured after that my planned Saturday 7 miler might be tough, especially if my ankle decided it didn’t the 7 miles from the day before. In the end I got the 7 miles done…in a faster time than the Friday night one! I was quite happy about that.
And then Sunday – I was kind of dreading this one…14 miles – I hadn’t done 14 miles since the Disney World Marathon back in January and I really didn’t’ know if I could do it. Definitely was not feeling confident going into this run even though I had done a 13.1 the week before. I have really lost my running confidence and it is going to take some work to get it back!
And, amazingly, I got it done – I had to do every treadmill trick in the book to distract myself but I got through.
So in the end I was only down 1 mile for the week despite feeling pretty damaged earlier in the week.
This week was tough though, especially with having both of the medium runs on back to back days before going into the long run. It was good for me mentally to complete that but I will really have to watch myself this week to make sure I didn’t push too hard. If I feel too drained, I will look at backing down aggressive climb in mileage on the long runs. The current plan has three 20 mile runs before the Dopey Challenge and if I need to I can reduce that to one or two and reduce the ramp rate for the long run mileage to save my legs, body and sanity!
This next scheduled week of runs might help on its own without having to back off though – it has the same mid week runs as this past week – 4-7-4 on Tues, Wed and Thurs. And then it has 7 on Saturday and 10 on Sunday – so the weekly long run backs off this week which hopefully will help if I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by the mileage.
In additional news – I seem to have my weight moving in the proper direction which is good. It is also 12 weeks today for my travel day for the Dopey Challenge, so things are moving pretty fast!
And with that I will end this post here.
Thanks for following along!
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