Random Banter

Today was the day I had been thinking about for the past 5 weeks or so.  It was race day! My last race, to recap, was the trail race at the end of August.  It went well but I came out of that race kind of down due to expectations being set to high and it messed with my head a bit.  I did get over and it's helped me reframe how I think about racing. Racing shouldn't be worrying about what place you will get or even what time you should get (mainly for trails I've discovered) but should be about you versus the course. So that's how I went into this race.   As I mentioned in my post last week my critical power did go down but I thought that was a mistake.  However I thought about it all week and thought maybe it was correct.  On Monday I did a work out of 6 times 2 minutes with 1 minute recovery which was about half of what I had done the previous Monday and I have to say it felt relatively easy.  So heading into the race I told myself that I was goi...

 I logged into the Stryd Powercenter yesterday after my long run to update my run with my thoughts and I noticed that my critical power, CP, had dropped.  It went from 322 to 312 (Stryd has a few bugs in their little graphs...they say it went from 325 to 312 but it was really 322!).  Which caused me to pause for a minute.  I should have known with running more on the treadmill and not doing any long hard runs that it would drop.  But after pausing for a moment I got it back together and told myself that I'd run what I had planned on running this next Saturday.   The race plan.  The Stryd race calculator says that I should race a 5K at about 319 watts and that will put me somewhere in at 27:37 which will not be lower than my summer 5K.  This might be subject to change but I think what I'll do it set my watch to run between 320 and 340 (Coros watches only do 10 watt increments).  My runs in the 330 area have felt really good.  I don't...

 I haven't posted here for a few weeks due to real life!  But I've been running and getting ready for this upcoming race in 2 weeks time.   Things have been going well...until recently.  I've been running 5 days a week and getting a couple of workouts in each week.  One workout is hard and the other isn't as hard.  However the last two times that I've run I haven't been feeling it.  Just felt kinda blah.  I got the runs done but on today's long run I cut it short by about 4 minutes and did not do any faster paced work which I've been doing on most of my long runs as of late.  I have a few theories as to why this might be the case.  Since I've started running 5 days a week my body hasn't caught up until now.  I've actually been gaining weight the last couple of weeks so I wonder if my body is under a lot more stress with this additional day or running.  So I've backed off trying to lose weight and am just going to try and m...

 I didn't expect to race again this year but there was a race that came up for early November so I went for it.  In all honestly I needed this.  It's a very long stretch from late August until sometime in the next year to not have something specific to train for. So this race was put on the schedule.  It's just a 5K race but it's reinvigorated me to get training for something specific.  Here's my plan.  This next week I'm just going to run like I have been running. So that means on Monday it will just be a very short run (25 minutes most likely) on the treadmill. Tuesday will be an outdoor workout of some sort.  I'm not sure what that will be but it will done at lunch time during work...if the weather permits.  I will run either on Wednesday or Thursday just depending on how I feel.  It will be another session like Monday. Friday will be the same.  On Saturday where I usually have a long run I will do a critical power (CP) test to see wh...

If you read my post from last week you know that I was not feeling my best towards the end of the week. That continued at the start of this week and I decided to error on the side of caution and not do any running until Thursday.  So I only ran on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.   Thursday and Friday were very easy running.  Just 25 easy minutes on the treadmill.  I should also mention that I stopped following the training I was following from Stryd.  Being sick and this upcoming weeks possible disruptions I decided it just wasn't the best time to follow it.  I probably won't be following a program until the middle of October.   Saturday's run was a long run of an hour.  I had planned on doing closer to 70 minutes but my brand new treadmill started making a knocking sound when I went above 6 MPH and at a incline of 2.  So I cut it off at an hour and then spent the next hour or so seeing if I could figure out why it was knocking....

 So I only got in 4 runs this week. It should have been 5.  And I started to get down on myself for that.  However I had to keep reminding myself that I am not a professional runner and life gets in the way.  So let me explain.  My wife hadn't been feeling well on Wednesday and on Thursday, after a rough day, she decided to take a COVID test. Well it was positive.  All week long we had been going to bed early but I didn't think a whole lot about it because we had been up earlier than normally (for my wife's work!).  But when she tested positive for COVID things kind of fell into place. Even though Friday was a super easy day (just 20 minutes running with a couple of 10 second speed ups) I decided to call it and not run.  Saturday morning I also ended up calling my long run, and I really wanted to do it.  However by the evening I was feeling a bit better.  So this morning I did get on the new treadmill and have myself an easy 25 minute ru...

 I've done the easy running before and it feels great for a few weeks but then there is no progress!  You have to have some sort of speed in there.  Just running slow and easy does not make you faster no matter what people say.  I do believe that 80%+ of your time/miles should be slow and easy but if you want to get faster, and who doesn't, you need to have that 20% where you are throwing in some extra stuff. So after 2 weeks of easy running, or doing nothing for the first week, I'm going to be starting a program tomorrow to maintain what I have.  I'll run that for about 10 weeks and see where were are at.   This last week was the first time I've ran 5 days in a week.  Everything went fine.  There were a couple of times where I wondered about getting up so early but I did manage to get it done.  My right calf, at times, when I run gives me a bit of issues but I can't put my finger on it. So for now I'm using the massage gun on it and hop...