Change of Pace

Rough year, really, but I guess doing a quick mental slog through it sets the stage for an improved 2008.

* I spent most of January sick, sick, sick and had to resort to antibiotics to finally get my health back, so hopefully this current cold won't be a repeat of that experience.
* In February, I got rejected from a really promising job prospect and sunk into a rather blue spell for a while since I was really burned out on the current job. My running team had a bit of a blow up over whether it was acceptable for members to get outside coaching and following that, most of the fastest women quit. I also took a brutal tumble down the subway steps that left me pretty banged up.
*Things perked up a bit in March as the weather started to warm up and I started boosting my mileage, but I still wasn't ready to start racing again and my unhappiness at work was still coloring every other part of my life.
* Maybe because I needed a mental escape from career worries, I really started a significant push in my training in April and was up to 70 miles a week by the end of the month. During the last week, I headed down to Cuba with my mother to visit my brother when that all came to a crashing halt. I stumbled over a tree root while scampering around with my brother's puppy and did more damage than I realized at the time.
* I started off May thinking it wasn't that serious, but increasingly problematic back pains finally sidelined me from the running completely. By the end of the month I was hopeful that acupuncture and rest might do the trick.
* In June, I finally abandoned my pipe dream of running a 2:47 marathon in time for trials qualification. I was a little sad about it, but it was somewhat freeing too to let that go. Throughout this month and even more so in July, my work and personal life began to really drag me down into a dark place, so it was kind of nice to just have the running as an emotional support, rather than yet another responsibility.
* August started off a little like the morning after some terrible devastation. I was almost startled to have made it through that far and the fact that I had allowed me to start picking up the pieces and figuring out where to go from there. I started running regularly again and wonder of wonders...finally got a new job. Life started looking up.
* I moved the blog over here to Alison's lovely little runner community in September and while it may have been mostly a symbolic move, it marked a fresh start. I ran a respectable cross country race and started to feel good about my team again as I got to know a few of the new, enthusiastic young women that had joined.
* I committed to starting a new training cycle in October with an eye towards Boston in the spring. It was nice to finally feel motivated to train towards a goal again. Work was making me happy and I was settling into the routine of my now long-distance relationship.
* November started off with such excitement over the men's Olympic trials in the park, but it quickly turned to grief when I was faced with Ryan Shay's tragic death in a very intimate, personal way. I struggled for weeks to escape the feeling that I should have been able to help save him and the images of that day are still very fresh in my memory. My own running was a comfort through that and I felt myself getting stronger. Another blow up with my club team caused all of the new women to quit, so emotionally, I really started to distance myself from caring anymore.
* I surprised myself at the beginning of December by nearly breaking 40 minutes in a 10K, so the feeling of getting stronger hadn't been an illusion after all. Getting sick there at the end kind of sucks, but with any luck that will be over with soon and I can get on with the business of making 2008 a much, much better year than 2007 was.

I wouldn't say I'm exactly healthy yet, but slowly, slowly I'm getting there. It kind of sucks that this is technically supposed to be the end of the second week of my Boston training schedule, since I barely topped 30 miles this week and spent last week miserable in bed running exactly zero miles. No way around it though what with being sick, so I can only try to be as sensible as possible as I build myself back up.

If my heart rate is to be believed, I really am on the mend. I forced myself to stay well above 9 minute pace, limited my runs to a 6.3 mile loop and only ran five days.

Tuesday's run at 9:20 pace gave me an average heart rate of 167 beats a minute.
Friday's run was at 9:38 pace and I had an average h.r. of 163 beats a minute.
Yesterday I sped up a little to 9:15 pace, but my h.r. was down to a 154 average.
And today, at 9:35 pace, my heart rate was down to an average of 147 bpm!

I'll aim to run six days next week and stretch out my runs by a mile or two. And I desperately hope this phlegmy coughing will start to subside, because it's really, really starting to get very old.

At least the weather is fairly mild. Thursday was pretty brutal at 11 windy degrees (I do realize that's practically balmy for some of you), so I felt justified in sparing myself that experience, but otherwise it's hasn't been too cold. The new year's resoluters were out in full force in the park today, but I'm guessing not too many of them were out there Thursday either.

Oh, and last but not least, I don't have to work overnights anymore! I still have the schedule of a waitress working until midnight straight through the weekend, but still, not having to be a vampire two days a week will have to be good for my overall state of well-being.

So on a bit of a whim, I decided to skimp on sleep Friday night (I get home from work close to 1 a.m.) and run a five mile race in the park Saturday morning. I actually thought it was a four mile race, but what's a mile here or there? I've been doing so much long slow stuff that it seemed like a good way to stretch out my legs a little, so I essentially chose to spend $25 on a speed workout.

The race was meaningless from a team points perspective, so I never pushed myself all out, but I was still pleased to end up with a 6:36 average pace, 15th woman and 4th in my age group. I ran 6:27 pace for the 10K I did in December, but that was a team points race and it was also before I got sick. I am much, much better now, but the time off from training and all that excess mucus that's still sticking around must affect the system at least a little bit.

At this point, I'm still planning on running Boston, though I'm a little bummed that my official training phase started off with a few sick weeks. Before the cold or flu or whatever it was struck, I wasn't really all that far off the mileage of my schedule leading up to my sub-3 in Columbus in '06. Now I'm trying to decide whether it's worth the risk of injury to try and get back on that schedule, or whether I should just resign myself to a lighter load and possibly a slower time.
Like last time, I'll start logging a record of my training schedule here, but due to my cold, this cycle will be 16 weeks instead of Columbus' 18.

Now I just have to figure out when a sensible time is to start injecting a bit of speedwork into my routine. Probably not during this, my "recovery" week, since I'm planning on running a half next weekend and calling that a tempo workout and probably not next week since I'll be asking my body to cope with higher mileage again, but some time after that. It's only January, the marathon is in April, there's still time for all that.

I do think that the skiing worked out to be a nice low-impact cross-training expedition, aside from the stupid snowboarder who slammed into me and left a big bruise on my thigh. I could really feel the stabilizing abdominal muscles on the side of my waist....the psoas, I think? I'd really like to be working more on my core strength, so this was a fun way to get started on that. This month's Runner's World has an article on core training, so I'll have to study that and try to incorporate some of the exercises they suggest. I don't ever want the freakishly non-runner-esque six pack that's sported by Josh Cox on the cover of the issue, but I guess if that was the price I had to pay to run a 2:13 marathon, I might reconsider.

If it had been one of those charity runs where you get a dollar for every person you pass, I think I would have been a couple benjamins in the red by the ten mile mark. I was consistently passed by other people up until that point when I was finally able to reverse the trend for the last few miles. I even passed another girl in the last half mile, but for the most part, it was not an intelligently run race.

I skipped running yesterday because my legs were just so sore, but I'm going to get back out there today and see if a really easy ten won't help work out some of those aches and pains. My feet were also really sore after the half which probably means that it's time for new shoes. Once I start upping the mileage it starts to seem like it's always time for new shoes!