Changes in Training .... last weeks totals

My training last week went really great and then really crappy. Its like that sometimes I guess as the runs early in the week went well. I was full of energy and my legs felt really good then KABOOM just when I was beginning to gloat I finished off with a couple of real sucktacular runs.

The last month has been a bit of a challenge in itself due to big change in training methodology. I got a new running program from coach Roger, see his blog here, which follows the Arthur Lydiard training philosophy. Lydiard was big on early deep base building (hey I can do that) kept at a slower pace (DOH!) with a focus of peaking at one spring and one fall race (Double DOH). Its been a challenge to stay easy and patient but so far so good.

I somehow managed to get all my mileage and runs in during the holidays and all went fine as I upped my miles on my Wednesday night run and hit the hills on Christmas morning. Nothing says Christmas like 12km of monster hills. I am currently running a great hill route just west of High Park (for those of you in Toronto) which I got from Roger. You can check it out here. When it's combined with my semi-hilly run to get to the hills it works out quite nicely. So nicely in fact I decided to run it twice. In hindsight this might have led to future crappy runs.

On Saturday I headed back to High Park in the pouring rain for a Club run on the trails. I felt great right up until the whole running part of the run. It took less then 30 seconds to come to the conclusion that this was going to be a slow painful training run. No worries just take it easy I thought. Well guess what you really can't take it easy when you're running through 6 inch deep mud. GRRRRR. After one loop of the trails done 7 minutes slower than usual (7 minutes on a 3.5 mile loop, you do the math)we stuck to the road where my legs really felt no better.

Sunday faired no better as I got in 28km with Steve. We were slow, my legs were tired and all that rain had frozen overnight causing slippery conditions on the road. We had to forget about running our normal Mount Pleasant Cemetery route and stuck to sidewalks where at least we could see the ice. The good is we discovered a new route that was okay and we will probably run again even though it does take us out towards the East end of the city.

What's up next, I am not really sure. I might do some indoor track races in the next couple of weeks but worry about a conflict with my training schedule as I really want to get my base mileage back into the 65 mile (110 km) range.

Last weeks training
Days - 6
Longest run - 28km (17.3 miles)
Total for the week - 88km (54.6 miles)