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Wasabi

Mid-pack racer and social running enthusiast. Full-time fitness specialist and part-time running store employee extraordinaire. Certified running gear fashionista and lover of laughing, lattes, and color coordination.

Wasabi Returns! NYC Marathon Training: Week 1 (7/21- 7/27)

Posted by Wasabi on August 9, 2014 Leave a comment

I had a pretty fun time in NYC back in 2012, even though the marathon got cancelled. Looking forward to crossing that finish line in an official capacity this November!
I had a pretty fun time in NYC back in 2012, even though the marathon got cancelled. Looking forward to crossing that finish line in an official capacity this November!

Buenos Dias, Salty Readers! Boy, has it been a long time! The last time we talked I was training for Boston, which turned out to be such a fantastically amazing experience that it couldn’t be contain to just one race report blog post! (Read part 1 here and part 2 here if you are so inclined.) My spring marathon was one of those rare and wonderful things that truly met and exceeded my hopes, dreams, and expectations in every way, but afterwards a crashed pretty hard from my glorious Boston high. No run felt as good  or as meaningful as that race did, and extra stress and exhaustion from life in general further contributed to my post-marathon turned extended summer funk. I was doing  much running, and the running that was doing just didn’t seem worth blogging about. But it is now August, and it is time to get out of the funk and back on the horse! Especially since my next big running adventure, the New York City Marathon (!!!) is  only 13 weeks away. This puts me 2 weeks behind in documenting my training, but for the sake of my own personal accountability, I’m going to back-track a little and start at the beginning here. So sit back, relax and enjoy Week 1 of my NYC Marathon training escapades. Weeks 2 and 3 are soon to follow, I promise!

Monday, 7/21: 6 4.5 miles easy.

I have decided to give the Hansons Marathon Method a go for this training cycling. I’ve chosen this plan mostly because the store where I work has the book so I was able to purchase it at a deep discount, and also because nothing in the world sounds worse to me right now than a 22 mile long run. (In case you’re not familiar, the Hansons top out at 16! #winning) I’ll be following the advanced program (even thought it is technically an 18 week program which I started today for my marathon that is 15 weeks away. Still not entirely sure how that one is going to work.) Today it called for 6 easy miles, which I had to do at the end of a day that started at 4 am. My lovely running friends Margaret and Kate were nice enough to meet me at 6:30 tonight for moral support and company. Neither of them were super-excited for 6 miles, so we settled for 4.5. I know, I know, I am low-balling and short-changing the program already and it’s only day 1 (or at least the 1st day I’ve actually done something that I am calling mindful marathon training), but I refuse to judge myself for the abbreviated run. I’m just looking at it as a mini-taper for tomorrow’s speed workout! Until then, stay classy y’all!
Tuesday, 7/22: Back on the Track, 6.27 miles.

Today marked the first workout of the NYC Marathon training cycle. It was great to have big group of fun faces, both old running friends and new show up to keep me company. Except in the end I ended up doing my own thing (everyone else is training for a later marathon than mine) so opted for my prescribed 6x 800 instead of their 12x 400. It was hard and I was completely spent when it was over, but all things considered, I think I did alright.

The goal was 3:10s, and here are the splits: 3:01 (oops! Too fast!), 3:15 (Damnit! Too Slow!), 3:07 (that’s more like it!), 3:10 (perfection!) 3:11, and a very hard-fought 3:12 for the last one.

All I wanted in the world was to lay down on the track when it was over. It was definitely a rust-buster, and I have a little work to do, particularly on pacing and consistency, but I was pleased to get through it more or less on pace, and it admittedly felt pretty great to be back. Cheers to the return of Track Tuesday!

Wednesday, 7/23: I am the cross training queen!

The Hansons called for a rest day today. I laughed in their faces. (Sorry Hansons.) To my great surprise, I have really been digging on the cross training this summer, so decided to enjoy a little today. 45 minutes of aqua jogging with my lovely friend Jen, plus some core and glute strengthening exercises, and the 12 fun miles on the ElliptiGO after work, just because ElliptiGOing is fun and it’s so nice to be outside at that time of day.And hey, it seemed to work out pretty well for Meb, right?  (If you are not privy to the awesomeness that is the ElliptiGO,you should read up on it here. It’s pretty much the most fun you could ever hope to have cross training.) Back to running game tomorrow! Happy trails until then, y’all!
Thursday, 7/24, 6 miles Tempo, 7.5 miles total.

Continuing on this week’s theme of firsts, today I completed the first tempo workout of the NYC Marathon training cycle. I’m accustomed to doing my tempo work in the form of shorter efforts at LT pace, and I like and believe in this approach, but the Hansons define things a little differently. Tempo workouts are more sustained efforts at marathon goal pace, and today the program called for 6 miles. That seemed like a really long way to go on a tempo day, but I tried to keep an open mind about it and not get bogged down by negative self-talk. My goal was to keep it somewhere in the 3:15 to 3:10 MGP range, which translated to 7:26 to 7:15 min/ mile.

Here’s how it actually played out:

1 mile warm-up, followed by 7:28, 7:12, 7:19, 7:23 (this mile included multiple cross walk/ stoplight interruptions, as well as an epic near-crisis bathroom stop that probably warrants a blog post all its own, but I will spare you the details.) And then 7:10 and 7:08 for the 2 final miles of working effort. It’s amazing how much faster and more focused I am without the burden of intense fear of pooping my pants. Major props to Solite Park (a park convenient situated on my greenway trail of choice) for providing an accessible bathroom when I really needed one!

So, my ~5 min. pit stop wasn’t really part of the plan and I have to wonder if I missed out on some of the intended benefit of the workout because of it, but I was glad to get through the workout nonetheless, and optimistic that it wasn’t a total waste of time. Hopefully frantic bathroom stops will not be a recurring theme of this training cycling.  Hooray for getting it done and for good coffee and better conversation afterwards! Party on, y’all!

Friday, 7/25:  A Not-so-Easy Easy 6.

I had envisioned the “easy 6 miles” that the Hansons prescribed today feeling much easier than it did. Perhaps I didn’t give yesterday’s tempo enough credit for beating me up (although I feel like a gave it a pretty decent amount of credit), or maybe it was the mid-morning heat and humidity. I also should not rule out the possibility that I am just even more out of shape and de-conditioned than I feared. In any event, let’s just say I was not at all at risk of overrunning my recovery run. And I was really effing glad to get it over with so I could move on with my day. My running calendar for the weekend is filled with good company from fun friends, so I’m hoping this will translate into enjoyable running! TGFI, playas!

Saturday, 7/26, Easy 8.

“Easy 8” seems like a massive oxymoron to me right now, but at least I was in the fantastic and hilarious company of awesome friends! Big thanks to Karen, J-La, and Kate for the miles, smiles, and coffee talk after. And an extra-special shout-out to Kate for letting me take a shower at her house, which is much closer to the running store than mine, so I could be both clean, and (sort of) on time for work. Cheers to the weekend, y’all!

Sunday, 7/27, 10 in The Umsteads.

Big, fun crowd for this morning’s long run! High fives to the Hansons for prescribing only 10 miles! We ended up making it 10.5 because that extra .5 got us to the water fountain, which was clutch given today’s rampant humidity and the sweat-fest that ensued because of it. Fasties Kara and Rachel were doing 15 min. pick ups at 7:25 pace, and that’s pretty dang fast for Umstead. (If you are not familiar with running in The Triangle, Umstead is the hilly-as-balls state park where everyone goes to do their marathon training long runs.)  I tried to hang with them for as long as I could, but I failed pretty badly, especially when there were uphills involved. I tried not to judge myself, seeing as I didn’t really have any reason to add pick-ups to my long run today, aside from just hanging out with my friends. All things considered, I felt pretty good, I got to hang out with a bunch of fun peeps, and didn’t really hate this run in any way, so I think I’ll call it a win! Cheers to closing the book on week 1 of fall marathon training!

Thanks for stopping by to check out my Salty Running training log! More to come soon, I promise! In the meantime, keep living the dream, and happy trails!

Love,

~Wasabi

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, New York City Marathon, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Boston Training Log: Weeks 11 – 13.

Posted by Wasabi on April 5, 2014 1 Comment

Wrapping up Week 11 of Boston training cycle with a teeny little 1/2 Marathon PR in beautiful VA Beach!
Wrapping up Week 11 of Boston training cycle with a teeny little 1/2 Marathon PR in beautiful VA Beach!

I am fighting this epidemic of blogging tardiness and delinquency with every fiber of my being, but it just won’t let up! Fortunately, this is not necessarily a reflection of how my training is going.  A lot has happened over the last 3 weeks, so to bring you up to speed (and to help me feel a little better about myself as a Salty Running blogger) I’m going to give you the quick and dirty rundown of Weeks 11 and 12 of my Boston training, plus my typical overly verbose play-by-play color commentary for my most current week of training (Week 13), although now that we are nearly through Week 14, it really isn’t all that current either. Sigh.

At any rate, here goes nothing…

Week 11 (3/10 -3/16) Highlights:

Total Mileage: 51 miles

Workout: 4x (800m, 400m)  Coach Saffron assigned me the goal of 3:10 for the 800’s and  1:30 for the 400’s.  Here are the actual splits: 3:07/ 1:28, 3:08/ 1:32, 3:10/ 1:27, 3:08/ 1:23. I’m not gonna lie, it bums me out a little to think that I was running this workout a little faster at this point during my fall training cycle, BUT I was also training for a shorter, faster distance then (if we can really call the half marathon a shorter and faster distance), AND it’s race week, so we’ll just call this a step-back workout. On the other hand, I did have to pat myself on the back a little for resisting the voice in my head telling me to over-run it and sticking to plan. I also gave myself an A+ for consistency. So all things considered, I’m calling this a win.

The Shamrock 1/2 Marathon: Hooray for a super-fun Oiselle Team meet-up and a successful Boston tune-up in Virginia Beach!  I still desperately want to break 1:30 in the half, but this obviously hasn’t been the focus of my marathon training, and I didn’t want to use up all of my fitness before I got to Boston (because that’s a thing, right?), so I decided to approach the race as a long run workout. I settled on a progression run strategy: 4 miles at 7:15 pace, 4 miles at 7:00, 4 miles at 6:45 pace, and then either 1 fast mile to the finish or a 1 mile cool down, depending on how the day played out. I didn’t actually calculate what finish time this might yield, mostly because I’m too lazy to do even the most basic of math and also because I wanted to stay focused on executing a quality workout, rather than getting hung up on a specific time. However, I suspected that if all went according to plan, I could probably at least match, and maybe even better my Richmond time from November.

 How it actually went down… Miles 1-4: I chatted my way through the first 4 miles with ease, thanks to the delightful company of super-adorable Oiselle teammate Stephanie! And we were NAILING the pace plan without even trying or thinking about it! Stephanie, if you are reading this, thank you again for hanging out with me for  those first few miles! Your presence was instrumental in helping me settle into a happy, comfortable confident place, and it set me for an awesome run! Here are the official Garmin splits: 7:00, 7:12, 7:13, 7:10.

The rest of it played out something like this: Miles 5-8: 6:58, 7:05, 6:55, 6:51 (Slightly ahead of the pace plan and feeling good!) Miles 9-12: Time to drop it down to LT/ 1:30 half marathon goal pace… 6:49, 6:46, 6:45, 6:41. One mile to go: Coach Saffron appears on the sidelines yelling motivating (yet borderline frightening) things. Better not slack off now! 6:13 for the final mile, despite nasty vortex-level winds! I looked up at the clock as I approached the finish and realized that if I REALLY HUSTLED I could in fact beat the Richmond time for a (teeny baby) PR! I made it in with 5 seconds to spare and an official time of 1:30:45. It felt very satisfying indeed to match my November time with ease and to execute the race plan to a tee! The 1:29:59 half is most certainly on my radar, but first I have new 26.2 PR to take care of.

Week 12 (3/17- 3/23) Highlights:

Total Mileage: 57 miles

Workouts: 

Recovery Run w/ the Fasties = Tempo-ish Run for Me! 9 miles total. I hung with the fasties (dude fasties included!) in the low to mid 7’s for the first 7 miles before dismissing myself for a more appropriately paced cool down. I’m calling this my tempo for the week.

3x 2000m at 10K (ish) Pace: I’m pretty sure these were more like 2000m at half marathon pace, but whatever. This was far and away the most un-fun workout of my entire marathon training cycle. I felt mentally and physical drained, I struggled mightily to hit the paces, and I couldn’t wait for it be over. But 2000m is kind of long, weird interval, and I suppose that not every workout can be all puppies and rainbows. Ah well, 1 workout closer to Beantown!

Long Run: 20 miles. So many hills. So many bathroom stops. Much like Friday’s workout, this long run was least favorite of the training cycle thus far. I guess the theme of Week 12 is humbling, lackluster running. But it’s all good. My superstitious side is actually a little relieved to have a week like this. Things have been going really well and I was secretly starting to fret that I may be using up all my running good fortune before Boston. Better too have bad days now that on race day. I’ll take this week’s trials and tribulations to be a good omen. Onward and upward!

And Finally, The Complete, Unabridged Week 13 (3/24-3/30) Rundown:

Monday, 3/24, Easy Recovery, 4.06 miles. After yesterday’s less than awesome 20 miler, I was secretly praying that no one would show up for Monday Runday. But alas, one brave soul was there waiting for me when I rolled up at 7, so off to the work campus 4 mile loop we went. The old hip flexors, hamstrings, and glutes were feeling pretty spent, but I didn’t feel too bad once we got going. Always nice to start the week off with some fun, easy miles!

Tuesday, 3/25, 5x 1000m, 8.69 miles. Somehow, by the grace of God, I did not have to work today! I’m not sure what inspired this random week day off, but I’ll take it! Just for kicks, and because I could I met up with Oiselle NC teammates Allie and Carolyn at UNC’s track for a little mid-morning speed work. My workout, per the BAA’s recommendation was 5x 1000 m at 10K pace with 2 min rest in between. Although my warm up, cool down and recoveries were PAINFULLY slow (I’m talking splits in the 10’s, y’all!) the working efforts felt pretty decent and went reasonably well. My goal was to hit roughly 6:30 pace for each interval, but as it turns out, it’s kind of tough not run all-out as fast as you can sometimes when you are on the track so things turned out a little quicker than that.

Here are the splits/ paces that I actually ran: 3:59/ 6:08 pace, 3:56/ 6:02 pace, 3:56/ 6:02 pace, 3:56/ 6:02 pace, 3:52/ 6:02 pace. So a little faster than my 10K pace, but I never felt like I was working outside of my fitness, so I guess it’s all good! Cheers to a lovely day off complete with speed for breakfast and burritos for lunch!

Wednesday, 3/26, Rest Day FTW!

Thursday, 3/27, Scrambling to Get the Miles In, 8.27 miles. I almost titled this training log entry “Scrambling to Fit It In” but I felt that the “That’s what she said” potential of a line like that might just be too much for Salty Running to handle. At any rate, suffice to say that today’s run, along with the rest of today in general, was a bit of a scramble. First my usual Thursday running buds were both unavailable for our regular early am meet-up. Left to my own devices, I failed miserably at finding the motivation to drag my arse out of bed and go do the run on my own. I opted for the snooze button instead and before I knew it I had overslept and was officially late to my core session with Saffron. I texted her to let  her  know as much, only to get a reply that she was bailing due to IT band/ SI joint discomfort from the boot of shame, which she has sadly recently been sentenced to. :(

Naturally, I was pretty bummed out by all of this sad news and utterly frustrated with myself for being such a non-self-starting, unmotivated piece of crap, but in the end I managed to pull it together and get myself out the door for a run.

The first to miles were slow-ish, and I fought hard to drown out the negative self-talk that was still spewing in my head after a morning of wasted productivity, but then I settled down and busted out some low-8 splits, and managed to further progress to some mid to low-ish 7s by the end, even with my nemesis hill up to the bridge on our little greenway. So maybe there is hope for me yet.

My time management skills still need lots of work, but I got it done! I don’t know about y’all, but I CANNOT WAIT to get through this week and Sunday’s final long-run of the training cycle so I can get my taper on! What, WHAT!!!

Friday, 3/28, 1x 15 min, and 1x 10 min at MGP (or something close-ish to that), 10.03 miles. Big shout-out to my homegirl Jen D. for keeping me company and providing the motivation I needed to get out of bed to do today’s run. Yesterday I was supposed to do what the BAA likes to call a “Medium Long Run”, but laziness prevailed. Furthermore, the BAA wants me to do some MGP tempo tomorrow, but little do they know that haven’t gotten around to a 22 miler yet because I was off running a whopping 5 second half marathon PR the weekend I was supposed to be doing that. Soooo, I am switching things up a bit and combining the medium long run with the tempo stuff today, doing some easy miles tomorrow, and busting out the big 22 on Sunday so I can cash in that glorious taper card. I know switching it up like this is probably doing it wrong, and I asked for no one’s advice or input in making these modifications, so here’s hoping they don’t come back to haunt me.

Anyhoo, here’s how today’s medium long tempo run went… The prescribed workout was 1x 15 min at MGP and then 1x 10 min at MGP with 5 min rest in between. I started with a 3 mile warm-up to get a couple of miles in the bank on the front end. When the watch chirped the 3rd split I darted off and it wasn’t until split #4 flashed up that I realized I had no idea what time I had started this 15 min effort. What I did know was that 1 mile had taken me 7:21, so I decided that 2 miles and a little change for good measure would be adequate to get me 15 minutes. The 2nd split of the first working effort was 7:14. I chugged along for perhaps another quarter or so just to make sure before starting my 5 min recovery.

Very shortly into round 2, the 10 min effort (or so I thought) I came across my friend Paul S. and his canine running buddy, Daisy. Paul recently ran a BALLER marathon PR and this was my first time seeing him since, so I was excited to congratulate him. He and Daisy hopped on board the MGP train, and before I knew they had pulled me through two chatty miles and well over 10 minutes at 6:42 and 6:47 pace, respectively. Whoops! Ah well, hooray for good miles and good company, and TGIF!

Saturday, 3/29, Easy, 6.03 miles. Just a few rainy, easy miles with Paul and Daisy. I’m sure you will all be shocked to know that I was running late today, because that NEVER happens. (Sarcasm!) In all of my flustered tardiness I could not find my Garmin, so to my great annoyance and anxiety I set off without it. Thank goodness Paul was wearing his so I could copy and paste his time and mileage for my Daily Mile post. Daisy dialed us in to a nice, chatty 8 min pace, and before we knew it we were back at the car. I was grateful for some good company and fun miles, but tomorrow’s 22 miler has really got me stressed as it looms over my head. As much as I’m kind of dreading it, I can’t wait to check that beast off the list. Only one run stands between me and the beautiful, glorious taper! Let’s do this!

Sunday, 3/30, Last Long Run in the Books, Bitches!!! 22.01 miles. Well friends, I am happy to report that the final long run of the 2014 Boston Marathon training cycle is in the books. I’m typically not one to brag, but y’all, I TOTALLY KICKED THAT LONG RUN’S ASS!!!! So I had been DREADING this God-foresaken run all week, particularly after last week’s not so great, unfortunate bathroom stop laden 20 miler. I was mortified that I might have to do this run by myself, but my kind, wonderful running friends rallied at my desperate email pleas and showed up in droves to run various bits and pieces of this monster mileage with me. God bless them every one.

My plan was to get 22 with roughly half the miles at MGP. I spent the first 6 in the comfort zone just testing the waters and trying to decide if I was having a good enough day to go after making the plan a reality or if I should just be ok with keeping it slow and steady.

I decided to start out with 2 miles at 7:30. That went pretty ok with 7:36 for the first one, and 7:29 for the second. I jogged back to my peeps for mile recovery, and decided to try 3 miles for the next effort. 7:20, 7:20, 7:32. Ok, that got me through more than half way. I could maybe be having an alright day. Let’s try another set of 2 miles and then 3 miles. 7:25 and 7:13 for the 2nd two-mile effort. Yes, today is probably a good day!

By the time I started the final 3 mile effort I was starting to wish for this run to hurry up and be done already, but I was also at mile 17 of 22, so there’s that. 7:33, 7:31, and 7:13. Booyah! Maintaining those low 7:30s even up the nemesis hill to the bridge at mile 18 of my longest long run was a nice ego boost for sure. As were all the awesome friendly faces and encouraging words from friends and kindred spirits on the trail. I really wish I could just pack up my delightful little running community and take it to Boston with me so I could have people all over the course saying nice stuff to me and making me feel like Miss America, but I figure there will probably be a person or two out there cheering on race, so I guess I’ll be ok.

At any rate, the dread last long run is DONE and it went really well! BIG EFFING YAY!!! If you need me I’ll be lounging in my compression socks and sleeping, eating, and hydrating like a boss for the next 3 weeks. I’m coming for you, 3:19:59!

So there you have it friends, 3 weeks of peak marathon training all rolled in to one painfully long training log blog post! Stay tuned for a few more weeks of taper tales as I rest up for the big day!

Until then, happy trails, and thanks for reading!

Love,

~Wasabi

Categories: Training Basics, Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Zen and the Art of Fun Running

Posted by Wasabi on March 27, 2014 12 Comments

fun
Sometimes even the most serious runners need to push the button. (Photo credit: hodgers)

So, remember that girl who ran the NYC Half and took a #selfie featuring an unsuspecting hot dude every mile? Don’t get us wrong, we thought that was totes creative and adorable, and we certainly salute her mad skills in the ways of taking consistently flattering action-shot selfies, but our girl Wasabi (me) has really taken it to the next level when it comes to elaborate mid-race photo shenanigans. I ran the Rock n’ Roll New Orleans Half Marathon as a “fun run” and put together a baller comprehensive guide for pulling off the ultimate fun run experience.

Read it and weep, selfie girl! Read more >>

Categories: Race Reports, Racing
Tags: fun runs, Wasabi race reports

Wasabi’s (Tardy) Boston Training Log, Week 10: 3/3 – 3/9

Posted by Wasabi on March 22, 2014 1 Comment

Boston Training Week 10: Wasabi channels some serious #pickypower to get her through yet another grueling run on the treadmill. #TeamPurpleFTW
Boston Training Week 10: Wasabi channels some serious #pickypower to get her through yet another grueling run on the treadmill. #TeamPurpleFTW

So I recently transitioned from a job where I mostly sat at a computer doing errr, “administrative things” (i.e. blissfully writing my Salty Running training log at work) into a job that keeps me running around like a banshee all day er’ry day. This has been a healthy change for my sanity and work enjoyment level, but sadly it has been at the expense of my Salty Running blogging punctuality. And let’s face it, I wasn’t doing all that great with blogging punctuality, or any other type of punctuality for that matter to begin with.

What I’m trying to say here is that this post my chronicles week 10 of my Boston Marathon training cycle, and that was 2 weeks ago. Weeks 11 and 12 are soon forthcoming, I swear, but in the meantime, read all about the 54 miles of awesomeness that made Week 9 one for the books!

Monday, 3/3: After Sunday’s 20 mile long run, I traded in my usual Monday Runday for Monday rest day. It was pretty sleety and gross today, so I think it all worked out just fine.

Tuesday, 3/4, 6.1 Easy(ish) miles.  I was hoping to get in 6 to 8 easy today, but as usual I was tight on time and busy running from this client to that job, etc.  Furthermore, I am far too lazy to get up  and get shit done early on my own, and  since I couldn’t convince anyone to brave the bitter cold for a pre-dawn run with me, I found myself squeezing it in solo at the always-odd-to-me 11 am time slot. But you do what you gotta do to get the miles in…

It was chilly and a little slippery-ish, but I felt mostly good and since I was pretty pressed for time and trying to maximize my mileage, I went ahead and dropped it down to MGP after a little 2 mile warm-up, and even made up for those 6x 30 sec strides that I eighty-sixed in favor of catching up with friends on Saturday. AND I ran into my  fabulous friend Caren and got to visit with her a little! #winning!

Hooray for feeling good and unbroken after Monday’s 20, and to getting it done!

Wednesday, 3/5, 2x (4x 800m). This week the BAA’s Intermediate Boston Marathon training program called for 2 sets of 4x 800 meters at 10K pace with 5 minutes rest between sets, so I headed out to the track to meet up with Kara and Laura M. for the workout. I was advised by Coach Saffron to aim for 3:10ish pace for the intervals, although that is a good deal faster than my real-life 10K pace.

Here’s what I actually ran… Set 1: 3:10, 3:05, 3:03, 3:01. Set 2: 3:08, 3:02, 3:03, 3:03. All things considered, I felt good and strong, and I was pretty pleased with the consistency of my splits. I just wish I had a teeny bit more time to get in a few extra miles, but alas, my crazy life of running from one job to the next to the next continues to prevail. Cheers to having a little company on the track and to being one more speed workout out closer to Boston!

Thursday, 3/6, Easy Peasy 8.09 miles. For the 2nd Thursday in a row I had the pleasure of running with the fun and entertaining dynamic duo of running pals Karen and Jen. I had 6 miles of great conversation with them before dropping them off at The Bean (our fave coffee shop and the starting point of today’s run) to finish up the last 2 solo. Hooray for fun miles, great company, and the gateway to the weekend!

Friday, 3/7, Back to the Dreadmill, 8.02 miles. I woke up this morning to find that it was cold and precipitating a wintry mix out. Needless to say, this did not make me excited about the 2x 15min tempo workout the was on my training calendar for today. I decided to do a little schedule rearranging and postpone my run until after my am personal training client. I thought I might take advantage of my new-found morning free time by heading over to the gym to do a little core work. In the end, the yucky weather rendered me too lazy to leave my house, so I substituted some leisurely coffee drinking for core work. And then it was STILL wintery mixing like a boss out after my PT appointment, so I begrudgingly drove back over to the gym to grind out some miles on the TM.

I just couldn’t find the mental fortitude for the sustained hard effort on the treadmill, so I opted for some shorter, faster intervals instead. 8 not-too-terribly-miserable miles and 6x 1 min at 10K pace followed by 6x 1 min at 5K pace later, another sweaty, unglamorous treadmill run was in the books.

Hooray for dry, climate controlled running, and TGIF!

Saturday, 3/8, Just Another Happy Little Donut Shop Run! 8.02 miles. Today I met up with yet another set of darling, fabulous running buddies, Sarah K. and Caren M. So happy to have some fun friends to hang out with on this chilly, slippery Saturday morning! I did a little slipping and sliding both in the car on the drive over and on the run itself. But by the time all was said and done it had warmed up quite a lot and things were starting to thaw out. Great to get some easy miles in without face-planting. Cheers to the weekend, y’all!

Sunday, 3/9, Garmin Trouble in Sunday Funday Land. 16 miles. Today I had an exceptionally awesome long run! The weather was marvelous, tons of my favorite peeps showed up to make it extra-fun, I saw even more of my favorite faces out on the trail, and to top it all off I felt absolutely great! Today’s 16 miles was supposed to include 2x 2 miles at MGP, but since I was feeling unstoppable and also because I bailed on this week’s tempo workout on account of inclement weather, I went ahead and upped the ante to 3x 2 miles at half marathon goal pace. (I know they say that you have to let missed workouts go and that there’s no use in making them up, but I felt good, so I went with it.) I mean, seriously guys, have you EVER IN YOUR LIFE said to yourself on your long run “You know, I feel really great today and I think I would like to do some additional miles at a hard effort.”? Yeah, me neither. But it happened today, I swear it!

Naturally, I was super-excited to get home and document all of this rainbow-and-puppy-filled awesomeness on Daily Mile, and that is when I realized that the unthinkable had happened… Somehow, (I still do not understand how), THERE IS NO RECORD OF THIS AMAZING RUN STORED IN MY GPS WATCH!!! Oh, the horror!!! I suspect the universe did this as a preemptive measure to spare you all my obnoxious gushing over my every mile split of this perfect and glorious long run. So just suffice to say that my average pace for the entire distance came out to be around 7:50 and my paces for the 3 working 2 miles efforts were roughly 7:20, 7:10, and 6:50, respectively.

In any event, I was pretty pumped and grateful to get in another long run where I felt strong throughout. Here’s hoping a can ride this little good long run streak all the way to Boston!

And so goes another week of Boston Marathon training. My so-far-so-good streak lives on for another week, and I remain cautiously optimistic about my fitness and my ability to hit the 3:19:59 goal. Looking forward to a proper fitness assessment next week at the Shamrock Half Marathon in VA Beach. Until then, you stay classy, Salty Readers!

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Boston Training Log: Week 9, 3.2.2014

Posted by Wasabi on March 6, 2014 1 Comment

Thumbs up for FREE birthday maple bacon bars, and for 33 fabulous years of Wasabi!
Thumbs up for FREE birthday maple bacon bars, and for 33 fabulous years of Wasabi!

Aloha, Salty readers! Week 9 of ye old Boston Marathon training cycle marked my biggest weekly mileage total in I don’t know when and the first 20 miler of the season! I’m knocking on wood as I type this, but so far my training has been more or less right on track, and I’m pretty pleased with how my body is holding up, especially considering that it turned another year older this week! Read all about the 61 miles of running that make up my most recent week of  training adventures right here in my Salty Running training log!

Monday, 2/24, Birthday Recovery Run, 5.5 miles. Today was my birthday and I wanted to start it off with a run and a maple bacon bar from Rise (my fave donut shop in the world!) My friend Amy was nice enough to join me for both of these activities. I seriously wanted to keep the run around 8:30 pace, but it was just one of those days where my legs wanted to go a little faster. (Why don’t those happen more often???) Try as I might, I was just having a hard time getting them to settle into a more appropriate recovery pace. (I know that sounds completely obnoxious, and I’m sorry, but it’s my birthday and I’m gonna say what I want.)

Anyway, Amy and I had a lovely run and an even better post-run visit which was made complete by a FREE birthday maple bacon bar, courtesy of Rise, FTW! It’s going to be an awesome birthday, I can feel it!
Tuesday, 2/25, 4x 1 mile at 10K (?) pace, 9.14 miles. The events of my morning (mom visiting for the birthday, plus am personal training clients) reduced me to a weird, yucky late morning workout time. The plan was 4x 1 mile at “10K pace” although the pace I was aiming for is in reality somewhere between 5K and 10K pace for me… I’ll just go ahead and call my 7K pace, otherwise known as 6:25.

The warm up felt horrid, and it was super-slow, but I tried not to stress out about it too much. Split #1 was a sluggish 6:27. After a quarter recovery, I clocked a 6:26 for the second mile split, and then a 6:22 for the 3rd. They weren’t feeling particularly strong or awesome, but at least they were consistent. Naturally, the 4th and final working effort began at the base of the dreaded Scott King hill. (In case you don’t live in Durham, and are thus unfamiliar with the American Tobacco Trail, this is the only significantly hill to speak of on the greenway trail where I typically do workouts.) I fought through the first uphill half of it with everything I had to keep the number on the watch in the 6s, and then tried to make up some ground once I crested the hill and started going down again. In the end it all shook out to a 6:26 split, which I suppose I feel pretty good about.

When the work was done I shuffled through the cool down miles back to the car. Although it didn’t feel particularly great are pretty, I think it is safe to say that I accomplished what I set out to do, so cheers to that. Another BAA speed workout in the books!

Wednesday, 2/26, Easy 6.13 miles. Just some nice, easy miles with my fun, fabulous friend, Jen. Very grateful for good company and for getting it done! Happy Hump Day, y’all!

Thursday, 2/27, A “Medium Long Run” 12.01 miles. Today the BAA’s training plan called for a “medium long run” of 10 to 12 miles. I met up with my always delightful friends Karen and Jen (a different Jen than the one from yesterday’s run) for the first 6 miles (so, so glad to have some fabulous company for the whole first half!) and then set out to do the second half solo at marathon goal pace. I was really pleased with how good 12 miles felt, and MGP splits were as follows: 7:49, 7:29, 7:28, 7:07, 7:14, 7:09. Guys! That last 7:09 was up a big-ass hill! Gave myself a major self-five for that one! Cheers to some (medium) big miles in the middle of the week! What, what!

Friday, 2/28, Rest day! Hooray for a glorious morning of sleeping in and leisurely coffee drinking!

Saturday, 3/1, Lonely Saturday Donut Shop Run, 7.92 miles. Saturday is typically an easy group run from the donut shop, but  today I arrived at Rise to find that I was THE ONLY PERSON to show up! Womp, womp… I waited around for a few minutes, knowing full well that NO ONE is ever later than I am and no one else coming, and then I set out on my own. I felt a little bummed out at first, but it wasn’t so bad once I got going, really. I saw several familiar faces, as one is bound to when running on Durham’s favorite greenway on a Saturday morning. And just as I was wrapping up my 3rd of what was to be 6x 30 sec strides, I came upon my physical therapist pals Evan and Brian. I spotted and chatted with them for a bit. Brian was ready to turn around, but Evan convinced me to head out for another half mile or so with him. And thus, my 7 mile run became 7.92 miles. It’s all good though. It just wouldn’t be Saturday morning without a little catching up with friends! Cheers to the weekend!

Sunday, 3/2, 20 mile Sunday Funday FTW! 20.01 miles. Well friends, the first 20 miler of the Boston training cycle is in the books! I don’t want to jinx myself, but I think it went pretty well. The official training plan prescription was 20 miles with 8 to 12 at marathon goal pace, but I tried not to get to hung up on the MGP part since I was doing this run in hilly-ass Umstead (the state park that everyone around here goes to for hilly Boston training log runs), and instead I just tried to focus on feeling good and not being a hill-wuss for 20 miles.
We took it pretty easy for the first 10, which got us through maybe 60 to 75% of the significant climbs.

The pace was a little erratic with the hills and I definitely started to succumb to my inner hill-wuss by the final climb, but even so my split for that last hilly mile was 8:17, which does not embarrass me at all, and I clocked a 7:42, a 6:54 (whoops!), a 7:09, a 7:21, and a hard-fought 7:43 for the post-hills/ pre-cool down miles. Oh, and the last mile of my cool down was also a 7:41.

Ok, so it wasn’t exactly 8 to 12 miles at MGP, and my consistency could use a little work, but whatever. If I’m being perfectly honest, I was just really pumped to survive a 20 mile run at Umstead averaging under 8 minute pace. So cheers to another great Sunday Funday, and another Boston long run in the books!

And so goes the story of Week 9 of my Boston Marathon training cycle. Hooray for birthdays, big miles, and getting shit done! 3:19:59 or bust, y’all!

Until next week, happy trails, and you stay classy, Salty readers!

Xoxo,

~Wasabi

Categories: Training Basics, Training Logs
Tags: birthdays, marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Boston Training Log: Week 8, 2.23.2014

Posted by Wasabi on March 2, 2014 Leave a comment

Wasabi's #selfieoftheweek! Ok, so it's not a selfie, but it IS  a cute picture of me and my running friends #flystylin' at brunch and it will have to do.
Wasabi’s #selfieoftheweek! Ok, so it’s not a selfie, but it IS a cute picture of me and my running friends #flystylin’ at brunch and it will have to do.

Greetings Salty readers! It is my great pleasure to announced that I have made it to the half-way point of the 16 week Boston Marathon training cycle! Only 8 weeks to go, and nearly half of those weeks are tapering! Color me ecstatic, and excuse my while I pause to do a happy dance! For what is now officially the week before last (pardon my tardiness again!) I ran 56 miles over 6 runs, and you can read all the juicy details right here in my Salty Running training log!

Monday, 2/17, Recovery Run, 5.01 miles. Just some easy miles after yesterday’s long run. I tried to be extra deliberate in just staying super-comfortable, not looking at the watch, and letting the legs go at a pace that just came naturally. Although I wouldn’t necessarily describe this run as super-comfortable, it certainly didn’t feel terrible, and I ran a pretty organically consist 8:30ish pace throughout, which is probably just about right for a recovery run for me. Hooray for starting the week off right!

Tuesday, 2/18, 3x (800, 600, 400, 200), 8.62 miles. I thought today’s BAA Intermediate Marathon Training Workout sounded pretty un-intimidating, but it turned out be kind of tough-ish. At least I had the great company of my running pals Kara, Jen D., and Margaret to get me through. After a sluggish, yet chatty warm up I got down to work: 3x (800, 600, 400, 200).

I forget to hit the lap button at the beginning of the 1st 800, and the split I have is for .55 miles in 3:16. Ugh. That doesn’t sound great, but it’s also slightly off, so whateves. Here are the additional splits for round 1:
600: 2:12, 400: 1:26, 200: 00:41

Set 2 was fairly smooth and uneventful with these splits:
800: 3:02, 600: 2:12, 400: 1:25, 200: 00:40

And then Set 3 unraveled a little with these splits:
800: 2:59, Emergency Bathroom Break: ~2:00 min, Chat with Kara about plans for my upcoming birthday socialization extravaganza: ~10:00 min, 6:00: 2:14, 400: 1:27, 200: 00:43

I think the extended break derailed my momentum a bit, but not too badly. And anything beats pooping your pants. Thus, another speed workout on the road to Boston is in the books! Cheers to non-frigid temps and a completely ice-free track!

Wednesday, 2/19, Rest Day, and also Hump Day.
Thursday, 2/20, 2x 15 min. at LT to Half Marathon Goal Pace, 9.01 miles. Today I was seriously struggling to access my running mojo. This was unfortunate news since it was tempo day. Maybe it’s my sad lack of routine this week (and this month and this year so far) as I transition into a different job configuration, or maybe it was the heat. Hell, it could have been the deafening sound of what must have been 1 million frogs chirping their little frog faces off for the entirety of this run. I don’t know, but it just wasn’t there today.
Somehow, I managed to (mostly) hit the paces for the working efforts, but the warm-up and recovery miles were pretty unfortunate in terms of both pace and feel. I kicked things off with 20 minutes (just over 2 miles) at what averaged out to be roughly 9:30 pace. I felt super-lethargic and I had no earthly idea how I would be convincing the legs to go any faster, and yet when it was time for working effort number 1, I managed to convince them to grind out 2.19 miles in 15 minutes for an average pace of roughly 6:50. (The goal was something in the half marathon goal pace to LT range. Translation: 6:50 to 6:40) It felt most laborious and ugly, but I’ll take it. Oh, and how the hell I’m going to do that whole thing all over again?!

I was not encouraged by my 5 minute recovery between sets, in which I covered 0.45 miles at 11:13 pace. Yikes.
But round 2 actually went a teeny bit better, covering 2.22 miles in something that likely averages out to 6:45 pace.

I disliked pretty much every step of this run, and all of this solitary training is starting to bum me out a little, but what does not kill me makes me stronger, and I did accomplish what I set out to do in the end. #gitterdone #3:19orbust

Friday, 2/21, Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy, 7.01 miles. Big shout-out to my friend Kara for joining me for a run today! I was so super-grateful for some company and some easy miles on the schedule. It was just what the doctor ordered. Just wish I’d had the time to, grab a donut at Rise (my fave donut shop where most of my runs start and finish) afterwards. Ah well, it’s probably better this way. Happy Friday, y’all!

Saturday, 2/22, The Usual Saturday 10. It was nice that today’s 10 miles mostly at marathon goal pace were not particularly frigid or rainy or slippery or icy. Just pleasant miles and decent weather. It’s about damn time. Liz and I ran the middle 6 miles of this lovely run at roughly marathon goal pace, with 2 miles of warm up/ cool down at both ends of the slightly faster effort. We only took one 10 ish minute break to chat with our friend Karen M. AND we saw Paul and Daisy (our favorite dog-owner running duo from Daily Mile, they’re kind of big deal!) and I got to hold Daisy’s leash!!!! Talk about celebrity status! We also delighted in legally crossing the bridge for the first time and high-fiving multiple fellow bridge enthusiasts! (In case you don’t live in the greater Durham area, they have been working on building this pedestrian bridge over the interstate to connect two separate sections of greenway trail for like the last 100 years and after much ado IT’S FINALLY DONE!!!) Cheers to the weekend and to 10 pleasant miles!

Sunday, 2/23, Long Run w/ 3x 3 miles at MGP, 16 miles. A group of my running buddies wanted to test out the course for the upcoming Merge Records 25K (a cool upcoming local race celebrating the 25th anniversary of Merge Records, and symbolizing the company’s move from Chapel Hill to Durham) for today’s long run. Although rumor had it that said course was hilly as balls (spoiler alert: the rumors are true!) it sounded like a fun opportunity to enjoy some good company and fresh scenery on the long run so I decided to tag along. My friend Sara, who has roughly the same Boston goal time as I do was doing a workout of 3x 3 miles at MGP (roughly 7:30 pace), so I agreed to tag along for that as well.
I was worried that this run might majorly suck for many reasons. First there was the whole aforementioned hilly-as-balls thing. Then there was last night’s amazing birthday celebration kick-off dinner, which consisted mostly of pulled pork, rich desserts, and fancy cocktails at The Pit (aka the yummiest upscale BBQ joint in town). Totally worth risking long run GI disaster, BTW.  And to top it all off it was probably 30 degrees warmer than it was for last week’s long run, or any other run I have been on in the last 3 months or so, so the odds seem stacked against me.
But I loaded up and headed out to downtown Durham to catch the shuttle to Chapel Hill (aka our running buddy Nancy’s minivan), and we started our long, hilly run back to the car. Sara and I allowed ourselves a 3 mile warm up before settling into round 1 of MGP. The first 2 miles of our 1st working effort were particularly hilly but we managed to make it through them in 7:36 and 7:46, respectively. No too shabby considering the climbing. The 3rd and final mile of working effort #1 started to head down again, allowing us to clock a 7:24. The downhill continued into our recovery mile, which we ran in a not-so-recovery-like 7:46. Ok. One round of hilly MGP down, and I don’t hate this run yet! Optimism abounds!

Round 2 was less climb-y and our splits reflected as much. We clicked them off pretty easily at 7:22, 7:30, and 7:20. I was kind of consumed by the fear of GI track rebellion after my night of gluttonous meat, alcohol, and dessert consumption, probably at least partly because this run just seemed to be going entirely too well so far, so I opted for the cautionary bathroom stop at the end of round 2, just to play it safe. I think this was the right call.
Once we started back up we jogged (that’s with a soft “j”) out an 8:43 recovery mile and then pressed on to our final round of work. I was feeling only mildly fatigued and anxious for this run to be over, and that is when it dawned on me that I was actually having a damn good long run despite the hills, warm temps, bizarre eating the night before, and many, many MGP miles! Happy Birthday to me!

I got through the first 2 miles of the final round easy enough with splits of 7:17 and 7:26, but the final mile of working effort was a bit of a ride on the struggle bus, thanks to a nasty climb of roughly 800m. Despite a sneaky suspicion that I might have actually be moving faster had I been walking, I managed to eek out at 7:31 for the final split. Holy crap! I just did 9 miles at MPG mildly hungover on a hilly course in 60 degree heat, and I didn’t once wish for death! Self-fives all around!

I was VERY pleasantly surprised by how this run went and very pleased with both my pace and my comfort level. Plus, Sara was a delightful running buddy and our paces were very compatible! Hooray for great company and well executed long runs!

So there you have it, friends. The story of how I have survive 8 weeks of Boston Marathon training thus far. I am knocking on wood and crossing my fingers as I type this in hopes of having the good fortune to make it to Hopkinton injury-free, well-rested, and ready to kick some butt! Cheers to another successful week of training in the books, and until next time, happy trails and thanks for reading!

~Wasabi

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, training log, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Boston Training Log, Week 7: 2/10 – 2/16

Posted by Wasabi on February 20, 2014 Leave a comment

Wasabi's (mildly unflattering) #selfieoftheweek! Post-long run laughs with my lovely #OiselleTeamNC teammates. #runnerselfie
Wasabi’s (mildly unflattering) #selfieoftheweek! Post-long run laughs with my lovely #OiselleTeamNC teammates. #runnerselfie

An alternative name for this post might be “Wasabi’s Surviving Snowpocalypse Training Log”. The weather certainly threw a big icy, slippery wrench into my running plans for last week, but it also saved me from what was shaping up to be the most hellish work week of my life, so I can’t complain too much. Through it all, I somehow managed to log 50 miles across 5 runs. Check out all the juicy details in this week’s edition of my Salty Running training log!

Monday, 2/10, Rest Day, FTW! I was feeling a little beat up from Sunday’s epic marathon relay victory/ long run combo, so I opted for a little rest day. Nothing like a little listening to your body to kick off the week!

Tuesday, 2/11, 7.5 Easy Miles, Plus Few Hill Sprints: Guys, I am staring down the barrel of the week from hell . The open at one job/ close at the other shifts are RELENTLESS this week, and I seriously don’t know if I’m going to make it. Struggling to find a way to fit the miles in nonetheless.

Today was a just an easy hour, plus a few little hill sprints with awesome run buds Kara and Amy. I felt pretty drag-assy and underwater, but I was also very grateful to get a little physical activity in my day, and for the support of awesome friends. Just taking it one day at a time this week. I can do this!

Wednesday, 2/12, THE REAL SNOWPOCALYPSE 2014 paralyzes The Triangle and thwarts my workout efforts! Unplanned rest day.

There's just no way you are getting your workout done when this is the scene in your town. (Photo source: onlyperfectinweakness@blogspot.com)
There’s just no way you are getting your workout done when this is the scene in your town. (Photo source: onlyperfectinweakness.blogspot.com)

Thursday, 2/13, Snow Day Dreadmill Grind, 8.01 Miles: After missing yesterday’s run thanks to the insanity that came with The Real Snowpocalypse Durham, I knew I couldn’t make any excuses today. The fitness center opened at 10 so I dragged myself on over for some work (and by “work” I mostly mean catching up on social media), some coffee, and some running on the treadmill. I tried to take the lessons I had learned from my recent treadmill speed workout suck-fest (ICYMI, you can check it out here,) and apply them to you know, making this time on the treadmill a little sucky.

My plan was to do something interval-ish to keep my mind engaged as much as possible, but not something so hard that it broke me mental and physically like last time. I settled on 6x 1 min at 10K pace (6:40)/ 1 min at 8:00 min pace, a 4 min break at 8:00 min pace, and then 6x 1 min at 5K pace (6:18)/ 1 min at 8:00 min pace. There isn’t any science or coaching expertise of any kind behind this workout. I was just going for something that would vary frequently to keep me entertained with bouts short enough that they wouldn’t kill me but intense enough that they still might give me some sort of aerobic fitness benefit. Who knows if this was a good choice from a physiology standpoint, but it worked pretty well as far as keeping my treadmill suicidal thoughts to a minimum. The 1 min intervals were completely attainable at both paces and the 2 sets of 6 ate up six miles, so I just had to slog through a 2 mile cool down to get the 8 miles I was after. The cool down may have been the most excruciating  part of the whole workout, but in the end it was still a vast improvement over my last treadmill experience. I immediately negated any caloric expenditure benefits of this run by consuming approximately 7 Thin Mint girl scout cookies upon returning to my desk (I swear they should rename those things “Fat-Ass Mints”), but hopefully I still reaped some marathon training benefits. Cheers to getting it done, even on snow days!

Friday, 2/14, Braving the Snowpocalypse Aftermath, 7.26 Miles: Today I just couldn’t bring myself to run on the treadmill again, so I set out to survey the carnage of Snowpocalypse 2014. The temperature was actually quite fabulous for running, somewhere in the mid to high 40’s, but the little trails and parking lots that make up the first part of my little around-the-work-campus loop were still quite treacherous indeed. I clocked an 11:06 split for mile 1 as I teetered, skated, slid, and swore my way across the first shady, glacial abandoned parking lot. It was on the road to melting, but still mostly a sheet of ice and slippery as crap. I was really glad to put that part behind me and proud of myself for busting neither ass nor face.

Mile 2 of my campus route goes up a little wooded trail to a substation and back. This part was less icy, but still very much covered in deep, crunchy snow. I was genuinely surprised by how far I sunk down into it with each step. Like 3 or 4 inches, probably! Guys, Snowpocalypse 2014 was actually kind of legit! (You know, by North Carolina standards.) 10:05 split for my second mile. OMG, kill me now.

By mile 3 I had cleared the sketchy, snowy parts of the route and was on to nice, plowed, paved roads. I thought I might try to get a few MGP miles out there but it didn’t really work out that way. Completely unable to settle into a rhythm and find my mojo, I ran 3 more struggle bus miles at 9:15, 8:26, and 8:12, respectively. (At least they were progressively less struggle bus-ish each time.) And finally, by mile 6 I was able to access one laborious little 7:30 split, plus at 7:57 for the final mile cool down. At least it wasn’t the treadmill. Although my last run there was much faster.

Ah well, cheers to getting it done and to remaining injury-free despite icy conditions.

Saturday, 2/15, Rainy Slush-fest, 10.01 Miles: I kind of can’t believe I actually went on this run, y’all. It was totes disgusting out there… Cold, rainy (and I’m talking real rain, not just a little drizzle), with slushy snow and black ice all over the place. But youngsters Emma and Liz were there to keep me company so off we went.

Since Snowpocalypse 2014 kind of effed up my training calendar for the week, causing me to miss, you know, all of my workouts, and some mileage altogether, I really wanted to get 10 in today to sort of make up for it. As we set out into the yuck I couldn’t help but wonder if 10 was really worth it.

The slippery conditions on the trail definitely slowed us down, but we progressed along in the rain without too much misery, until about mile 8 until I reached the point of complete and utter saturation through and through. My “water resistance” vest was drenched and my no-longer dri-fit shirt clung to me in an unpleasant fashion and I dreamed of stripping all those wet layers off in favor of a warm shower. But I was this-close to getting to 10, so eff it. Hooray for getting it done,  maintaining my zero-face plants in the ice streak, and for the weekend!

Sunday, 2/16, Hilly, Slippery, but Still Good Long Run, 17.21 miles w/ last 4 at MGP: This was a really good long run, despite the fact that the route essentially visited the courses of all of the various races on my list of local events that I never want to do again. It was quite hilly indeed and many an icy spot/ bridge kept us slow and (at times not so) steady for the first part of the run. This probably really came in handy at mile 13 when it was time to pick it up for 4 miles at MGP. I was feeling a little beat up and lethargic from the hills by the time go-time rolled around, but I was really pleasantly surprised at how strong I felt once we got rolling with the working effort part. I had vowed to really stick to the plan of truly running marathon goal pace (7:30). No more of this ridiculous too fast shit. I mean what is the point of that anyway? But alas, the thrill of speed got the best of me once again, and my alleged marathon goal pace splits looked like this: 7:01, 7:03, 7:10, 6:58. These were miles 14 through 17 of today’s 17.21 mile run. Probably inappropriately fast, but I was happy to finish strong and comfortably, even after 13 hilly, slippery greenway miles!  Week 7 of the Boston training cycle is officially in the books, friends!

And so goes my tale of yet another week of Boston Marathon training. Looking forward to reaching the half-way mark next week! Until then, happy trails Salty readers!

Xoxo,

~Wasabi

Have you had to modify your training plan on account of winter weather? How do you manage getting  your miles in when mother nature is being an inhospitable punk? Tell me all about it!

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Treadmill Tip of the Week: A Peek Inside the Mind of a Treadmill Rookie

Posted by Wasabi on February 13, 2014 6 Comments

Treadmill
While some of you have an easy relationship with your treadmill, mine’s playing hard to get. (Photo credits: Best Buy)

The other day I had some serious speed work on the ol’ training calendar. I was a little nervous about getting it done on the track, but then the unthinkable happened – I found myself in a position where I had no choice but to do my workout on the dreaded treadmill!

While some of you (*cough* Cilantro *cough*) are pros at getting it done inside, the treadmill and I have some work to do on our relationship. I wish that this could be one of those posts where I would be all like “Ooh, I was all worried and nervous because I had to do my workout on the treadmill, but then I did it and it was awesome and now the treadmill and I are like totes madly in love.”

It’s not. You’ve been warned.  Read more >>

Categories: Training Basics
Tags: treadmill, treadmill tip of the week

Wasabi’s (Tardy) Week 5 Boston Marathon Training Log: 1/27 – 2/2

Posted by Wasabi on February 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Wasabi's #selfieoftheweek (from the week before last). Cool window reflection pic with the besties in NOLA! #runnerselfie #lategram
Wasabi’s #selfieoftheweek (from the week before last). Cool window reflection pic with the besties in NOLA! #runnerselfie #lategram

Well Salty fans and friends, my life as of late has been insanity to the max. I’m talking opening at one job then closing at another, cramming runs in at obscure times and in the most mundane of places, erratic and far from ideal eating and sleep habits, and basically just desperately grasping at straws to make it through the day in one piece and still get the miles in. I suppose I’m doing pretty well considering, but I really hope that this work/ life balance crisis levels off soon. It’s been so nuts that I haven’t even posted last week’s training log! Until now. I realize that it is highly unlikely that you missed it at it’s regularly scheduled time, but just for the sake of consistency, follow-through, and training accountability I’m going to go ahead a post it a week late. Feel free to take it or leave it. I’m still not entirely sure how I did it, but somehow I managed to Tetris 52 miles of training over 6 runs into the week of Jan. 26th through Feb. 2nd. Highlights include a new treadmill distance PR (aka the most God-awful hour of my life thus far) and “The Big Easy,” a Rock n’ Roll New Orleans half marathon odyssey. So without further ado, I give you Boston Marathon Training, Week 5!

Monday, 1/27, Easy Recovery, 4.01 miles. Gah! Why does Monday Runday have to be so darn fast these days! I am excited to see my little work run group runners getting faster, but damn, sometimes I miss the good old days of 9:30 pace. Especially after yesterday’s beastly 7-miles-at-MGP  long run, which may or may not have broken me.

Anyway, I survived and managed not to whine too much in front of the group, but I was really relieved that we didn’t go any further than 4 miles. Happy Monday Runday to all!

Tuesday, 1/28, Easy Hour, 7.6 miles. Today my goal was to just run for an hour and try to enjoy it without getting caught up in maintaining or hitting a specific pace. I found this surprisingly hard to do. I felt a little tired and drag-assy, but I also found myself fretting about getting in a few MGP miles, which would probably only serve to make me even more tired and drag-assy, so I tried not to look at the watch and just let it happen.

This turned out to be one of my more consistent runs around my route on the campus at work with the first few miles in the mid to low 8’s a few miles in the mid to high 7s and then another low 8 plus 6x 20 sec strides with 40 sec recoveries. Cheers to Tuesday and to Snowpocalypse Durham 2014, which is happening tonight!

Wednesday, 1/29, Treadmill Speedwork Suckfest, 5x 4 min at 5K Pace, 8.01 Mother-effing miles. Today the unthinkable happened. I had no choice but to do my workout on the dreaded treadmill! Ugh! I wish that this could be one of those posts where I was all like “Ooh, I was all worried because I had to do my workout on the treadmill, but then I did it and it was awesome and now the treadmill and I are like totes BFF.” It’s not. You’ve been warned. (Seriously, I disliked this run so much that I chose the “blah” Daily Mile emoticon, and I ALWAYS chose the smiley face!)

I know you’re probably thinking something like “Oh, you wimpy southern douche bag! Guess you stayed in ’cause you couldn’t handle a little snow!”, right? Well, shut up. This wasn’t a cold weather problem, it was a staffing issue. Since today was a snow day, I had to open the fitness center (and yes, we still opened a 5 freaking am despite the fact that we are located in North Carolina), and I was stuck there alone until pretty much the end of my shift. With a busy afternoon ahead of me, I had to get my workout done in the morning and since there was no one else there and running out doors would mean leaving the joint completely unattended, I was confined to the treadmill.

The workout was 5x 4 min. at 5K pace, which I thought sounded vile even under the best of circumstances. I had NO IDEA how this was going to go, or if it was even possible since I had previously never even cracked the 1 hour mark on the TM, much less attempted any sort of hard effort on it.

I climbed aboard and fired up the 2 mile warm-up. Holy crap, you have to put this thing on level 7.5 just to get to 8:00 min pace?! OMG, I must have to put it on like level 17 to get it down to 6:20! Does it even have a level 17?!? It must have a level 17. Saffron does this all the time, and she runs really fast… Wow, I’ve only been running for 30 secs? Kill me now… And so went my treadmill inner monologue.

The warm up was kind of boring, but I got through it easy enough once I settled down. Time for round 1. I hadn’t foggiest what speed I would need to set the machine on to find 5K pace, so decided I would start with 10. I wondered if this might actually prove to be too slow because I felt like I had to jack it way on up there just to get to warm-up mode. As it turned out, 10 was a little to fast, but not that far off the mark. I dialed it back to 9.5, which is 6:18 pace according to the treadmill I was using.

Guys, I swear doing intervals on the treadmill is like entering some sort of bizarre time warp where everything happens at least 2x slower than it does in real-time. Holy long-ass 4 minutes. I finished round 1 and stumbled over my feet in my effort to straddle the belt so I could grab a sip of water. It took me by surprise that the hard indoor effort seriously dried out my mouth and throat out. My mis-step spiraled into the most epic save ever, shooting me towards the back corner of the deck, arms failing and obscenities spewing all the while. But I mercifully managed to catch myself on the rails before impact, thus holding my dignity in tact by the skin of my teeth and narrowly escaping what was sure to be the belt burn of the millennium. I can’t decide if I am incredibly relieved or disappointed that absolutely no one was around to see this little spectacle.

Round 2 was fairly uneventful. I made it through and successfully straddled the belt with no major disaster. But by round 3 the effort was starting get uncomfortable and my pre-schooler-esque ADHD attention span was really starting unravel. I decided this might be a good time to try some mantras. I usually think those are bullshit (no offense to anyone who thinks they’re awesome) but things were getting desperate and I was only somewhere around half way through. I repeated every positive, calming affirmation I could recall from every positive-think i-heart-running blog and tweet I’ve ever read. “Breathe in, breathe out. I am stronger than I think am. Eff this stupid effing mantra.” That ate up all of about 10 sec. Ugh. But I made it through yet another round without face-planting. Progress.

By round 4 I decided that it was time to bring out the big guns. I busted out the mother of all mantras and our Ragnar DC battle cry, “Everything is fine. Nothing is f@#$ed.” And I didn’t just repeat in my head, I freakin’ sing-song yelled it (silently, of course), like ROTC style. I think all this mantra excitement might have gotten me a little too worked up because at roughly minute 2 of 4, the dreaded feeling of impending vomit set in. Commence panic mode. My rational brain had ceased participation in this workout miles ago and I was consumed with thoughts of the fear and shame of barfing on the work treadmill. My panic level increased when it occurred to me that I was only person in the building at the moment, and therefore I would be solely responsible for cleaning up any barf that might happen. OMG, and FML! Miraculously, I made it to the end of round 4 vomit-free.

My spirit was completely broken by the final round. All attempts to buoy myself up knowing this was the last one were completely in vain. I made it through about 90 seconds at 5K pace before I caved and despairingly took a break. I think I was weeping by this point. At least on the inside. Then I got really angry at myself for being such a wimpy little bitch, gritted my teeth, prayed not to barf, and busted out the final 2:30 seconds at 9.5. This put me at a mileage total of 6.75. I was determined to run 8 miles on this abomination of a machine if it killed me. Try as I might, I could not stop obsessing over that little track indicator thing that tells you how many 400 m laps you have completed on the display. I tried to count all the little triangle markers that go around it to pass the time, but that was making me feel kind of queasy. So then I just tried counting. I made it to maybe 60 before I decided that counting required entirely too much brain power for my current state. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, I completed the longest 1.75 miles of my life and watched the display flash that glorious 8.0 in the distance box. Oh thank God. Somebody hug me.

And that, friends, is the sweaty, pathetic tale of my new treadmill distance PR. MAD RESPECT to all my homies out there who run on the treadmill day in and day out. Y’all are  Jedi Masters of self-discipline and dedication, and I have no idea how you do it. Cheers to snow days that allow me to have the whole gym to myself, and to getting it done!

Utterly unable to #findmystrong on the treadmill, even though I was wearing these nice pink Saucony Mirage shoes. :(
Utterly unable to #findmystrong on the treadmill, even though I was wearing these nice pink Saucony Mirage shoes. :(

Thursday, 1/30, Easy, 6.01 miles. After yesterday’s epic treadmill festival of suffering, it seemed critical to do something to remind myself that running is actually an activity that I enjoy, or at the very least a thing that I do not hate. So I set out for my same old ho-hum run around the work campus intent on staying 100% within my comfort zone, and maybe even enjoying myself! (Crazy, right?) I tried my very best to entirely disregard my Garmin (in retrospect I probably should have just not worn it), and I truly did rather enjoy crunching through a little driven snow. (Guys, there is STILL a little bit of Snowpocalypse snow here!!!) Not the fastest 6 miles I’ve ever logged, but not the slowest either, and I am pleased to report that I honestly did not hate any part of this run in the slightest! Maybe there is hope for me yet!

Friday, 1/31, Tempo Ladder, 10 miles. God bless Saffron. She came all the way from her fabulous new house in the far away part of Chapel Hill (that’s like 30 minutes away!) just to keep me company on my tempo run around the same old shitty work campus loop today and I could not be more grateful for this. I seriously do not know that I could have willed myself out the door to do this without her!

Have I mentioned that my work schedule has been mercilessly kicking my ass lately? It’s been all the opening shifts at the fitness center and all the closing shifts at the running store like all day er’y day, and I feel and most likely look like a heinous zombie. I had NO IDEA where I was going to find the energy for 15 mins, 10 min, and then 5 mins at LT pace today, but somehow with Saffron by my side we made it happen.

The 15 min part wasn’t pretty. I covered 2.25 miles averaging something that probably comes out to low 6:40 pace. (As usual, this is a guesstimation. Math is for losers.) The effort felt high and bad, and even though 6:40 is technically what I claim as my LT pace, I’ve been rocking some pretty consistent 6:30-something splits for the tempo stuff recently and was kind of bummed to see things slow down a little on this one. But 15 minutes may be the longest sustained LT effort I’ve attempted this training cycle, so there’s that.

For the 10 min effort I covered 1.53 miles, with a 6:33 split for the first mile, and 6:28 average for the .53. Shaving that 5 minutes off put me in a much more comfortable place mentally, and obviously my pace reflected that.

The final 5 min effort felt luxuriously short and I covered .77 miles at an average pace of 6:32. A strong enough finish, I suppose. I was honestly very pleasantly surprised that I was able to access LT pace in my exhausted, bedraggled state and I’m certain that this wouldn’t have happened without Saffron’s presence and pacing.

So cheers to getting by with a little help from my friends, and TGI frickin’ F!  I’ll be reporting live from The Big Easy this weekend! Get pumped!

Sunday, 2/2: A Lesson in Fun Running, 16 miles. “The Big Easy” is an appropriate nickname for both the city of New Orleans and the “race” I ran at Rock n’ Roll New Orleans.  Just in case we’re not Facebook friends and you haven’t seen the 1 million pictures from our awesome NOLA weekend, here’s the deal… My running bestie Kara and I flew down to New Orleans with our other BFF , Swiss, who was on a mission to run a badass new marathon PR (mission accomplished!) Kara and I ran the half just for kicks, and to get some miles in and see the city.

This week’s Sunday long run assignment from the BAA’s Intermediate Boston Marathon Training Program was “16 to 18 miles easy”. (THANK GOD!!!) You’d better believe I ran those 16 miles about easy as they come! I’m talking multiple photo stops  plus donuts, king cake, and JELLO SHOTS on the course! NOLA is the coolest! (*Disclaimer: Remember as you are chasing down your next PR or time goal that accepting any kind of outside aid is technically against the rules, and that taking jello shots from strangers is not recommended. Especially in New Orleans. Always drink responsibly and don’t try this at home.)  Kara and I had an effing blast, and it was so, so lovely to be reminded that running is something that I love because IT’S FUN! (What a concept!!!)

I think this might have been a personal worst for me with regard to half marathon times, but it was a huge PR in half marathon fun! And I was really quite proud of myself for busting out 3 additional, not at all embarrassingly slow miles post-finish line and more importantly, post-jello shots to hit the minimum long run requirement for this week’s training plan.

Exciting blog photo essay re-cap forthcoming! Onward, Bourbon Street!

Seriously ya'll, fun running is THE COOLEST and Rock n' Roll NOLA is the perfect race for it! Just look at all this fun we had!
Seriously ya’ll, fun running is THE COOLEST and Rock n’ Roll NOLA is the perfect race for it! Just look at all this fun we had!

And so another week on the proverbial marathon training struggle bus ended on a fantastically fun note! Hooray for a very desperately needed run-cation and here’s hoping I can find the time and energy to make it through the next 11 weeks of training! Happy trails until next week, Salty Readers!

Have you ever run a race just for fun? Did you do, wear, or eat anything ridiculous? Tell me all about it in the comments!

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, training log, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Training Log: Boston Training, Week 4. 1.26.14

Posted by Wasabi on January 29, 2014 1 Comment

Wasabi's #selfieoftheweek: Delicious, homemade post-long run lattes with Saffron, Allison, and mini-Saffron!
Wasabi’s #selfieoftheweek: Delicious, homemade post-long run lattes with Saffron, Allison, and mini-Saffron!

Hi there, Salty Readers! Another week of my Boston Marathon training program has come and gone and boy, was it a tough one! Craziness at work plus the return of the Polar Vortex made my schedule erratic and training partners scarce. It wasn’t easy braving the cold and the hard workouts mostly all by my lonesome, but somehow I managed to grind out 50 miles over 6 runs last week. Here’s hoping this will prove to be boost to my mental strength, confidence, and independence moving forward.  Now  get comfy while I tell you all about my epic, lone wolf week of training!

Monday, 1/21, 4.02 miles: Another nice, brisk Monday Runday! My little run groupers at work just keep getting faster. Always nice to start Monday with some easy miles!

Tuesday, 1/22, 8.01 miles w/ 6x 20 sec Strides: Nice, cool easy/ MGP miles on the ATT with run buds Amy P. and Rachel, plus Kara and Lacy for the first 2. The Legs and the pace felt really good. I was feeling a little fatigued by the final round of strides, but I guess that’s kind of the point. As always, I was grateful to get some good miles with good company. Hooray for getting it done!

Wednesday, 1/23, 2x (4x 800m), 8.51 miles: In case you haven’t heard, it snowed like a fraction of an inch in Durham last night! OMG! Unfortunately, our little Snowpocalypse rearranged my schedule a  bit. Our opener at work didn’t feel comfortable risking driving in on “icy roads” (I put that in quotation marks because the road were not actually icy), so I had to come in at 8 to relieve the substitute opener. Since there was no one to meet up with for an ass-thirty am sub-freezing workout (not complaining here), I had to run in the afternoon. Naturally, I spent my whole day stressing out about stuff  like getting it done, carefully timing my lunching, having to do it by myself and from work, etc. I was pretty relieved when it actually came time to go so I could just get it over with already.

Today the BAA’s intermediate Boston Marathon training program called for 2x (4x 800m) and Coach Saffron agreed that this was the way to go. As always, I thought it seemed pretty daunting, especially since I was doing it by myself and mid-day, but it had to be better than those effing 2Ks from last week, right?

In the end, it did not feel as great or as easy as I had hoped, but I got it done. The intervals were supposed to be at 10K pace with 90 sec recovery in between, and 5 min. recovery between sets. According to Coach Saffron, my 10K pace should be roughly 6:33. What actually happened was something in between 10K pace and Vo2 max…

Here are the splits… Set 1: 3:02, 3:04, 3:01, 3:01. Set 2: 3:06, 3:09, 3:08, 3:07

Although the 2nd set came a little closer to the prescribed pace, I was kind of bummed that it was slower than the first. I know that’s totally silly, but I just thought round 2 felt a little better and smoother and more controlled. I suppose there is a good possibility that the 2nd set felt better because I was running slower, but still, faster splits are always a nice ego boost.

At any rate, it wasn’t all that easy, and I didn’t feel super great or excited about it, but damnit, I got it done, and I did it all by myself. So that’s pretty cool, and worthy of a point or 2 on the Wasabi Becomes a More Confident and Independent Runner score board. So yay for celebrating Hump Day in style by conquering that beastly workout!

Thursday, 1/24, REST DAY! Holla! 50 minutes of aqua jogging FTW!

Friday, 1/25, 4x 1 mile at LT Pace, 9.01 miles: Today was an epic workday from hell that I had been dreading all week. Opening at one job and closing at another made for 5 am to 7 pm work-a-palooza, and my only break to speak of was going on this run, which I was also dreading because (a) it was a hard effort at the end of a tough week, crammed into the longest day of all, and (b) it was more frigid than ever this morning, and that’s when my workout had to happen.

I incessantly stalked my phone’s weather app all morning, watching the temperature creep from 9 degrees to 10 to 12, which was where it seemed to stick. 12 degrees. I know some of you have probably spent your winter dealing with colder temps, but to this North Carolinian that just seemed really effing cold. As game time approached, I seriously considered just bagging the run until tomorrow, or worse, doing it on the treadmill! (Gasp! Who AM I?) At 10 am I told myself that if the temperature (still stuck at 12) rose to 15 degrees by 10:30 (the latest possible time I could start my run and still get away with not cutting it short) then I would go outside and do it.

At roughly 10:27 I held my breath as I opened the weather app to see that the temperature was…. wait for it… a balmy 16 degrees. Half annoyed that it was not still 12 so I could call the whole thing off, I bundled up and set out to take care of business.

I have no idea how this happened, but to my great surprise, I had an awesome run! This was particularly unexpected because if I’m being perfectly honest here, Wednesday’s workout was a lonely ride on the struggle bus, and I had feared the same for today, being confined to the same lackluster route around the campus at work, and even more run down than I was earlier in the week.

But somehow I felt strong and the miles clicked by quickly, and reasonably consistently. My splits for the 4 working efforts were 6:36, 6:30, 6:35, and 6:32 vs. my goal of roughly 6:40 pace, and I felt really good about that.

When all was said and done it was a huge win to get through workout where I felt really good completely by myself and despite stressful, less than ideal circumstances. Add a few more points in my column on the confident, independent runner scoreboard! Cheers to Friday and to my survival of the most epic workday ever!

Saturday, 1/26, Easy 6.01 miles:  My running store hosted a (very chilly) fun run on our local greenway trail this morning. Guess who drew the short get up early and go stand out in the effing cold while everyone else gets to stay indoors and not come to work until 10 straw? This girl. Standing in 20 degrees (which is double the temperature it was a the same time yesterday) is MUCH colder than running in 20 degrees. When it was all said and done, we had an awesome turnout despite the cold and I enjoyed being a part of it, except for the part where I had to forgo my beloved customary Saturday doughnut shop run.

Instead, I was reduced to running after work, which was supposed to end for me at 4. I finally escaped around 4:30. My plan was to run from the store, so as not to get sidetracked by things like my couch or my laptop that could thwart productivity at home. But alas, no running tights or pants of any sort made the trip to work with me that day. Since pants-less running is (sadly) considered to be socially unacceptable, I headed home where I reluctantly set out on what felt like my one hundred millionth run around the work campus of the week.

It was 5 pm by the time I started and I felt very uneasy about getting caught in the dark. Running around campus when no one was there was pretty creepy, and I was very eerily stared down by a deer as I lapped an empty parking lot. All I could think of for the rest of the run was those infomercials for “When Animals Attack” which scared the crap out of me as a child.

It wasn’t particularly fun because I was feeling uneasy and counting down the miles and minutes until it was over every step of the way, but I got it done.

Sunday Funday (?), 1/26, 14.5 miles with miles 6-13 at MGP. (Well, kind of…) Guys, running 7 miles of your long run at marathon goal pace is not as easy as it seems like it should be! Eff! This was a tough one!

The plan said “14 to 16 miles with miles 6 through 13 at MGP”. I really wanted to get the 16, mostly because this time next week I will be living it up in NOLA and it seemed like a good idea to get a longer long run under my belt in case I’m inclined to slack off a little while I’m away. But Coach Saffron insisted that 14 was the way to go.

The first 5 miles went well enough. Just cruising along and chatting with Caren, Allison, Lacey, and Sarah at 7:45 to 8:10 pace, but then Saffron and the fasties  looped back to get me, and so the suffer-fest began. Perhaps I’ve already mentioned this, but I thought it sucked to have to drop it down to MGP  halfway through the run. Like a lot. This could be because my first split for the MGP miles was 7:13. My marathon goal pace is 7:30. When I saw that split and realized that it felt like crap and not all maintainable (not to mention the fact that it was NOT MGP), I vowed to run my own run, even if it meant letting my fastie pacers go. I kind of did that for MGP mile 2, which flashed up in a more appropriate, but abysmal-feeling 7:36. I think my rabbits felt bad for me because they slowed down until I caught up with them, and pulled me through another heinous 7:08. I have to do this for how many more miles???

I summoned my best polite and grateful, yet firm voice and told my speedy pacers that I HAD to slow down to survive this workout, and also in order to do it correctly and actually benefit from it. I successfully talked them down to 7:20 for the next split. And somehow, by the grace of God, I began to feel less terrible. The remaining splits were 7:21, 7:19, and 7:10. It took a few miles, but I eventually settled into a (only a little faster than MGP) rhythm. And that last 7:10 was just a classic case of hurry-the-eff-up-and-get-the-last-mile-over-with. I couldn’t even hang on to anything that started with an 8 for the remaining mile and a half, even with the aid of a sad and desperate bathroom stop. So much for getting 16 miles in.

I probably  definitely over-ran the MGP portion of the run, and this was evident by how spent I was by the time I reached the cool down. But I got it done, and so closes another week in my 2014 Boston Marathon training log. Looking forward to taking somewhat of a step back next week, and happy to be one week closer to Beantown!

Cheers to finishing another chapter in the Boston training saga, and hooray for pushing through some pretty gnarly workouts all on my own! I think this element of building self-reliance and self-confidence is something that has been lacking in my marathon training gone by, and my race performances have often reflected it. I’m going to go ahead and high-five myself for practicing a lot of solitary training this week and mostly coming out on top!

Until next week, happy trails and thanks for reading!

Do you struggle with training on your own too? How do you cope when you are stuck doing a hard workout all by yourself? Teach me your ways, friends!

 

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Boston or Bust Training Log, Week 3. 1.19.14

Posted by Wasabi on January 21, 2014 Leave a comment

Highlight of Wasabi's training this week: The Charleston Half Marathon! Good friends, free beer, shrimp and grits, and the gnarliest headwinds around!
Highlight of Wasabi’s training this week: The Charleston Half Marathon! Good friends, free beer, shrimp and grits, and the gnarliest headwinds around!

Buenos dias, Salty Readers! I have completed yet another week of marathon training and lived to tell about it! My third week of Boston training consists of 6 runs for a total of 47.31 miles. Highlights include a pretty abysmal attempt at speed work on Wednesday, and a mini race report from the Charleston Half Marathon on Saturday. So cozy on up to your laptop or mobile device and read all about it!

Monday, 1/14 Recovery Run, 4.13 miles. It was a clear, crisp Monday morning and I was kind of glad to have some seasonally appropriate, non-crazy weather. Just one other brave soul joined me in tackling Monday Runday, and it was one of the quicker souls from my little at-work running group. As always, it was a lovely way to start the week, and I was grateful to get a few miles in at respectable, but comfortable pace. Monday Runday FTW!

Tuesday, 1/14, Easy Hour, 7.64 miles. For the second Tuesday in a row I found myself on a solo afternoon run.  Last Tuesday I was holding out for the “heat of the day”, better known as 20 degrees or the least polar-y part of the polar vortex. Today, after an epic Monday that included a 4 a.m. wake up call and zero hours of napping, I decided that I deserved to sleep in. I further rationalized this when no one from our little running group listserv responded to my pleas for an early a.m. running buddy. I’m pretty sure I’m incapable of getting up to run by myself in the morning even when I don’t need extra sleep. So to make a very long – but not all that interesting – story short, I opted for an afternoon run today.

My plan was 1 hour with 3 to 4 miles at marathon goal pace (7:30 ish), and I suppose I kind of accomplished that. I definitely got the hour run part, anyway. As I always do when I run the boring loop around the campus at work, I felt really sluggish in the beginning, but progressively better as the run went on.

The miles I had hoped to run at MGP turned out to be 7:44, 7:23, 7:20, and 7:41, so a little slow, then a little fast, and then a little slow again. Whateves. I didn’t do the math, but I’m betting that all averages out to roughly 7:30, so let’s just go with it. Cheers to getting it done on Tuesday!

Wednesday, 1/15, Something Akin to Speedwork, 8.42 miles. Guys, Al Buehler punched me in the face this morning. (Not Al Buehler the legendary Duke University Track and Cross Country coach, but the trail that bears his name.) Holy super-tiredness! Someone pass the coffee and the foam roller!

This morning’s run was a comedy of errors to say the least, but my always rock-solid friend and teammate, Nancy, was there to keep me company and save the day, so I’m optimistic that it wasn’t a total bust. (God bless you, Nancy!)

According to the BAA’s intermediate Boston Marathon training program, my workout today was to be 3x 2000m at 10K pace. I thought this sounded like a wretched suckfest, and I proposed to Coach Saffron that I substitute our track club’s workout of the week, 2 to 3xs a ladder of 1 min, 90 sec, 2 min, 90 sec, 1 min with 90 sec rest between efforts. Saffron ruled this an unacceptable substitution, but I spent my entire warm-up fretting over which workout to do nonetheless.

I had agreed to meet the track club group at our normal 6:30 time, just so I would have someone to be accountable to, and I had it in my head that they would be starting their workout on the fitness loop (this weird little add-on loop to the XC course) for some reason, but before I knew it, our warm up gang turned on the Al Buehler Trail and we were off. Guess I’m doing the track workout. Confused and caught completely off guard (some sort of verbal cue announcing that the workout was starting would have been awesome) Nancy and I muddled through the first round of the ladder. The surprise start plus the up and down-ness of Al B. (let me tell you, it’s one hilly son of a gun!) made it very difficult indeed to hone in on 10K pace. I think we were both feeling a little frustrated and out of control at this point, so we decided to switch it over to the BAA’s 2K workout.

We did one effort to the fitness loop. 2K proved to be long enough to get a nice sampling of both uphill and downhill, and my average pace was nowhere close to 10K. (7:08 vs. 6:30) Pretty far off the mark, but I think with all the hills and the sloppiness the effort was probably still pretty 10K-ish. We took a 3 min recovery, which we mostly spent complaining about how awful 2Ks and the Al Buehler trail are, and then did a 2nd 2K effort (2 laps)  around the fitness loop. Talk about FML.

I managed to keep that effort (barely) sub-7, with a hard-fought a 6:57 average pace, and I was very, very glad when it was over. Nancy is a XC Club Nats 2013 veteran, and she said next year’s race should be at Duke because Al Buehler is way harder than this year’s course in Bend. I believe her.

So needless to say, it was a pretty tough run, and I was really, really grateful that Nancy was their to get me through it, even though she was way ahead of me most of the time. Hooray for getting it done, and Happy Hump Day to all!

Thursday, 1/16, Another Glorious Rest Day! 3 cheers for 45 min of aqua-jogging!

Friday, 1/7, 6 at 6 with the girls, 6.01 miles. You’ve gotta love running friends who cheer wildly in the parking lot when you pull in at 6:03 as opposed to your usual 6:08 to 6:12 arrival time. It’s all about the small victories, y’all. I was feeling pretty grumpy when my 5 am alarm went off, but I couldn’t help smiling when I was greeted by my run buds Jen and Kyle’s  happy, cheering faces.

It was dark, and even with headlamps, (theirs, naturally I forgot mine. Remembering the headlamp AND being on time (ish) would just be way to much to ask for) it was pretty much impossible to see what was happening on the watch, but that was why this run was awesome.

The miles flew by quickly as we chatted, listening out for the Garmin beeps to count down the miles until the turn around. It was one of those runs that felt gloriously comfortable and effortless. Just what I needed on the eve of tomorrow’s, hopefully not-too-gnarly marathon goal pace + a few miles at LT long run, also know as the Charleston Half Marathon.
Cheers to fun friends and fun miles!
Saturday, 1/8, The Charleston Half Marathon! 13.1 miles, plus 2.25 miles warm-up/ cool-down. I’ve always thought of Charleston, SC as a warm, sunny place. This was not the case on Saturday. It was sunny enough I guess, and the temperature was chilly, but certainly not the coldest I’ve ever run in. The thing that made it unpleasant was the wind, which was in our faces practically the whole way.

Thanks to chilly temps and crazy wind, Caren and I were reluctant remove our layers at bag check.
Thanks to chilly temps and crazy wind, Caren and I were reluctant remove our layers at bag check.

Teammate Caren and I lined up a little further back than we usually might. I thought this would be helpful in avoiding going out too fast. It was, but if I had it to do all to over again I would move up a little more. But I got to say hi to fellow Oiselle bird, Sara who was running the full, so no regrets. Congrats on your new PR, Sara!

The start was kind of a crowed cluster with much bobbing and weaving, but we managed to escape the first mile in 7:39. Since my goal for the race was to keep things mostly around marathon goal pace, I decided I was fine with this. Once things spread out and opened up a little we clicked off a 7:18 and a 7:20 for miles 2 and 3, and I decided to try to chill out a little.

Miles 4, 5, 6 were mostly through lovely, historic downtown Charleston, and we cruised through them  easily in 7:24, 7:32, and 7:26. All well within the MGP zone! So far, so good!

Somewhere in the midst of mile 7, we found ourselves on a yucky, un-scenic highway, floundering in the crazy headwind which was rampant with no buildings to block it. Gross. We tucked in behind a really tall guy for some seriously blatant, unabashed drafting.  This was worked out pretty well for us for a mile or so, but he was rather non-responsive when we tried to engage him in conversation, so we let him go for fear that we were annoying him. Despite the unpleasant wind, we made through miles 7, 8, and 9 in 7:22, 7:29, and 7:22, respectively.

The plan was to pick it up at mile 10. I was envisioning a nice,strong finish at roughly my lactate threshold pace (6:40 ish). That isn’t exactly what happened, but I did manage to drop it down to 7:00-ish and hang on for the last 3 miles. The first fast mile came easy enough, but at approximately mile 11.5 there was this part where you kind of jump down off a little curb or railroad tie thing on to an unpaved greenway trail of sorts. As I made the step down I was taken by surprise by a feeling of light-headedness. Huh… “What is that?” I wondered. And then it dawned on me that this was the feeling of hitting the wall. Of course once this thought crossed my brain, it was all over mentally. No 6:40 pace for me today.

I told myself not to be to be a douche bag and summoned up every shred of tenacity I could muster to maintain the 7:00 pace to the finish. It wasn’t easy or pretty, but eventually I made it to the line, and I was successful in not slowing down.

Needless to say, my inability to pick it up at the end was a little disappointing. I can think of a million different excuses for why I didn’t do it… Fatigue from fighting the wind for so many miles, inadequate fuel for a marathon goal pace effort before and during the race, just not having my head in the right place to go fast, and the list goes on… But at the end of the day I’m mostly ok with it. The good news is that I can most definitely run 10 miles at MGP, even in an awful headwind, and I can even speed up and run 5K at 7:00 min pace after that. I feel like all of this can only be beneficial in terms of marathon training.

So there you have it friends, the story of how I survived the brutally windy Charleston Half Marathon! Now bring on the shrimp and grits!
Sunday, 1/19, Pre- Brunch Shake-Out Run, 5.5 miles. I was glad that Caren wanted to get in a few miles this morning before we packed it up, threw down on some serious Charlestonian brunch, and headed home. We set out from the hotel for an easy jaunt. It was one of those classic out-of-town non-scenic down-the-main-road out-and-backs, and it was still windy as all get out. But aside from general fatigue and some minor tightness/ achiness in the lower butt/ high hamstring area on my left side, it didn’t feel too bad. So I think I probably survived yesterday’s 10 miles at MGP, plus 3 miles at 7:00 min pace without breaking myself. If you need me I’ll be at brunch celebrating with the “Bottomless Mimosa” special!

Just in case you were wondering, I did eventually find the bottom of the bottomless mimosa.
Just in case you were wondering, I did eventually find the bottom of the bottomless mimosa.

And so concludes the story of the 3rd week of my little marathon training journey. Big thanks to all of you who were a part of it and to those who bothered to read about it! It feels good to have another satisfying week of training in the books!

What’s your big spring goal race? How’s your training going so far?

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Training Log: The Road to Boston, Week 2 (1/6 – 1/12)

Posted by Wasabi on January 15, 2014 2 Comments

Wasabi's Marathon Training Selfie of the Week! The post-long run Starbucks 5-person selfie!
Wasabi’s Marathon Training Selfie of the Week! The post-long run Starbucks 5-person selfie!

Salutations, Salty readers! Week 2 of Boston Marathon training is in the books! It wasn’t quite the overly-enthusiastic, filled with wiggly puppy excitement week I described in my Week 1 training log, but it wasn’t half bad either. I ran a total of 46 miles over 6 workouts and 5 hours and 58 minutes, and you can read about every exciting detail right here in this little post! So get pumped! Here we go…
Monday, 1/6, Recovery Day: 4 miles. It was 60 degrees when I started my run this morning. I ran in short sleeves. The expected temp for tomorrow morning is 14 degrees. This makes me wonder if the forecast for Wednesday could be The Apocalypse. But I digress…

Anyway, I was feeling a little regretful for stating in my “RSVP for Monday Runday” email that we would be running outside “no matter what”, but I was relieved to find that it wasn’t raining when go time rolled around. The weather held until roughly mile 3 of our 4 mile run, but then the bottom fell out. Thus, reducing our distance to 3.71 miles rather than 4.  Dang.  We almost had it all. Alas, I guess that’s just Monday for you…
Tuesday, 1/7: Easy Hour on the Coldest Day of the Year! 7.01 miles. OMG, I RAN OUTSIDE IN THE POLAR VORTEX!!! Yes friends, this wimpy little North Carolinian ran out of doors on the coldest day of the year. Granted, I held out for the warmest part of the day, a balmy 20 degrees, but still, I fancied myself to be pretty tough for layering up and getting out there and making the magic happen. (Yeah, I know the polar vortex wasn’t as polar-y in North Carolina as it was in other places, but that didn’t stop us from claiming our fair share of whining about how cold it was.)

All weather ranting aside, it was a nice, consistent, uneventful run. I logged the first 3 miles around 8:15, then 4-6 were 7:45-ish, plus a little cool down for lucky #7 in 8:02. Somewhere in there, probably mile 6 I also threw in 4x 30 sec strides with 1 min recoveries just for kicks.  And that is the story of how I went for a run in the middle of the Polar Vortex and lived to tell about it!

Wednesday, 1/8: Speedwork: 2x (800m, 600m, 600m) 5.54 miles. It’s hard to believe today’s workout was only 5.5 miles (actually we covered a little more ground than that, but the watch data does not include recoveries.) 2x (800, 600, 600) (which was supposed to be 3x 800, 600, 600, but SOMEONE was horrifically late. I won’t say who that someone was, but let’s just say it wasn’t Saffron.) felt quite challenging indeed and I was pretty grateful when it was done.

The intervals were supposed to be at 5K pace (let’s say 6:20), and here are the splits…
Set 1: 3:10/ 6:10 pace, 2:16/ 6:09 pace, 2:23/ 6:14 pace.
Set 2: 3:00/ 6:09 pace, 2:11/ 6:06 pace, 2:24/ 6:16 pace

I seemed to have 5K pace mostly figured out by the end of each set. I’m pretty annoyed with myself for having to ditch the last round on account of my tardiness, and even more annoyed that the appointment I allegedly had to run off to turned out to be cancelled, but honestly, I don’t know that it was my day to do 3 sets, so I guess I should just be happy with what I got and move on.

Also, I am recommitting myself to being more punctual in 2014, so wish me luck. I SERIOUSLY SUCK at punctuality, so I’m going to need it!

Thursday, 1/9: Rest day! 40 min. of aqua jogging with a friend just for kicks.
Friday, 1/10: Tempo, 2x 10 min. 8.01 miles. I started today’s run feeling tried both physically and mentally. The weather was gray and rainy, and I was feeling pooped from an action-packed week and not-so-pumped about running. I was even less pumped about the possibility of running fast. Thank goodness Saffron was there to make sure I got my arse in gear!

We left for a jaunt around the campus where I work with 2x 10 mins at LT pace (6:40ish) on the docket. Saffron cheerfully described the wet, dreary weather as “very Nike Oregon Project-ish” . This made me feel a little better and tougher.

I felt very sluggish indeed on the warm-up, and when it was time to go I decided that my best bet was to just sit on Saffron’s shoulder and let her pull me along while I hoped for the best. This strategy is kind of the opposite of my running goal for the new year, which is to become more self-reliant, self-motivated, and self-confident, and to do a better job of running my own run. But tagging along was honestly all I had the energy for today, so I just let it happen.

Just as I had hoped, Saffron pulled me right along to a 6:41 mile, followed by .51 miles at 6:44 pace to round out the first interval. (Let’s say that comes out to a 6:42 average for the complete 10 min?) And round 2 was a  6:36 mile followed .52 miles at 6:29 pace. I arbitrarily assign round 2 an average pace of 6:34.
I admittedly felt more alive and better about my life by the end of the workout and we cooled down with 2 miles at 7:31 and 7:45 respectively. It was wet and sloppy and not my peppiest run of all time, but we got shit done, and for that I am thankful!

Saturday, 1/11: Hour at Roughly MGP. 8.03 miles. An extra-exciting group of fabulous running friends showed up for our Saturday donut run today! So great to see some fresh new faces, plus the usual suspects. I was pretty pumped to fit 8 whole miles into just over an hour and they were close enough to marathon goal pace that I am marking this one down as an hour at MGP. Cheers to great friends and yummy donuts!
Sunday, 1/12: Long Run (better known in my inner circle as “Sunday Funday”) 14.01 miles. Another lovely Sunday Funday FTW! We returned to Umstead for this week’s long run, and did the same route as last week, but in reverse. I can’t decide which way is worse. I think the direction we went in today is a little easier. Although the climbing might be more sustained, it is generally not as steep and demoralizing.
At any rate, the weather was pretty great and I felt comfortable in just shorts, long sleeves, and compression socks. The way winter running should be. I enjoyed the company of Saffron, Allison, Caren, and Jen E., and was pretty pumped to keep the average pace (barely) sub-8 despite being temporarily separated from Saffron while she set out to do a few marathon-pace miles of her own. (Sometimes I struggle to believe that I am capable of running fast without her. #runningBFFcodenpendencyproblems.)

I managed to pull off another week of no splits slower than 8:30, even in the hilliest of places, and it felt good to finish strong with some strides.

And so I have officially survived 2 whole weeks of marathon training with out breaking anything or falling apart! Cheers to that, and here’s hoping that the training good fortune continues! Only 14 more weeks until Beantown!

How did your training go last week? What big, exciting races are you training for? Maybe I’ll see you in Boston?

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: marathon training, Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Training Log: Boston Training, Week 1, 12/30 – 1/5

Posted by Wasabi on January 8, 2014 Leave a comment

A sweater-wearing Corgi! Just one of the many highlights of Wasabi's training this week! Photo Source: Etsy.com
A sweater-wearing Corgi! Just one of the many highlights of Wasabi’s training this week!

Happy New Year, Salty Readers! Here’s hoping 2014 is off to an amazing start for all of you! I’ve been a little absent from the Salty Running Training Chronicles lately because honestly, I don’t know that we can call the running I’ve been doing since Richmond “training.” Furthermore, I felt like crap on at least 90% of the runs I did go on in the time period between Thanksgiving and New Years, so what little I documented was mostly whining, and seriously, who wants to read all that?! But I’m optimistic that all that grumpiness and crappiness was just on account of low motivation, not lack of fitness. Also, I couldn’t be more excited to report that as 2014 begins, so does a shiny new training cycle for me! It’s time to start gearing up for the Boston Marathon, and I am SUPER PUMPED about it! So follow along if you’d like over the next 15 weeks as I share my training adventures right here on your favorite running blog!

The Road to Boston, Week 1, 12/30/13 – 1/5/14.

Monday, 12/30: Easy Singletrack Jaunt. 6 miles. I had to open at work today (my workday started at 4:45 am!) so I was reduced to running alone, and in the afternoon. NOT my ideal training scenario, but I tried to trick myself into getting excited about it by making it a little adventure. I hadn’t been out to the singletrack at Umstead (the state park that all the cool kids like to run in around here) in I don’t know when, so I decided to take on my fave little singletrack loop just for kicks.

It wasn’t easy, but I somehow managed to get myself out there with succumbing to my strong desire to take a nap, only to realize that I had (gasp!) forgotten my Garmin!!! Now I am a Garmin-or-it-didn’t-happen person to the death, so I had to seriously talk myself out of just throwing in the towel and driving back home to claim my nap. But I reminded myself of how lame that would be, and that if I just applied myself this would probably over in an hour and I could celebrate with a nap that I had actually earned, and off I went.

I was shocked (and selfishly mildly annoyed) at the bazillions of hikers out on the trail. I have never seen the like of walking traffic out there! But then I saw someone walking a Corgi wearing a jacket and that made this run and the hiking traffic seem more worthwhile. Cheers to getting it done and a nice change of scenery!

Tuesday, 12/31: 6x 800m, 8.07 miles. My last run of 2013 was the first workout of my Boston Marathon training cycle! I cannot even begin to tell you how great it felt to be running with purpose again! I think my extended downtime after Richmond was necessary, and that it will pay off in the end, but man, it made me feel super-unmotivated and really out of sorts at times! I’m very glad to be back on the horse, and especially excited to be gearing up to go back to Boston!

The workout was 6x 800m at not-quite VO2max. We figured it would be best to start bringing things back slowly. I was aiming for roughly 3:10s, so here are the splits…

3:13, 3:08, 3:05, 3:13, 3:07, 2:59… I’m guessing that all averages out to roughly 3:10, so let’s just call it mission accomplished.

We also threw in a few hill sprints, just because the city of Durham is expanding our go-to greenway/ rail trail so it actually has a legit hill now, and, well, so does Boston. Hooray for a good start to what hopes to be a rewarding training cycle, and Happy New Year, Salty friends!

Wednesday, 1/1: 7.5 miles. Not a bad first run of the year at all, especially considering that I rang in 2014 by staying up extra-late and consuming an exotic variety of adult beverages! Very pleased indeed to manage a decent pace and feel mostly unhungover. Thanks to Saffron for keeping me company, and cheers to a healthy and happy new year!

Thursday, 1/2: Back to Work! Rest Day!

Friday, 1/3: 4x 5 minutes Tempo. Hooray for the first tempo run of 2014 ! Have I mentioned how happy and excited I am that the down time is over and I am working towards a goal again! And I am extra-excited that the goal is Boston!

It was far from warm out there today, and we only saw a few other brave souls, but things went well and we celebrated tempo run success with the first Rise donuts (which are my very favorite baked goods in the free world) of the new year!

The workout was 4x 5 mins at LT pace, so I was thinking something between 6:40 and 6:50, but I was running with Saffron, so I guess it’s no big surprise that we ended up going a little faster than that. The cold temps and fierce head-winds were extra-motivating as well.

Here are my average paces for the intervals: 6:35, 6:26, 6:48, 6:24. I definitely felt like I was pushing my limits by the last one, because, well, I was, but on the whole I felt good and strong. You can always tell that a workout went well when it doesn’t reduce you to 10 minute miles for your cool down. (Although that part might have just been what I like to call “The Saffron Effect”.) In any event, it feels good to be back! Yay!

Saffron and I celebrate the first tempo run of the new year with the first delicious donuts of the new year!
Saffron and I celebrate the first tempo run of the new year with the first delicious donuts of the new year!

Saturday, 1/4: Easy 7.01 miles. It was a pretty chilly morning, at least by North Carolina standards, but that did not stop Saffron, running buddies Sarah K. and Jen, and me from going out on our standard Saturday donut shop run. I felt like the cold kept us moving quickly, and I was pleased to pull off nearly an hour at marathon goal pace without feeling uncomfortable. Now if I can just figure out maintaining that pace for an additional 2 hours, 19 minutes, and 59 secs I should be all set for April.

Sunday, 1/5: Long Run, 14.01 miles. What an exciting week of firsts! Today marked the first Sunday Funday of the Boston training cycle, the first longer-than-90-minute run I’ve done in I don’t know when, and my triumphant (?) return to the trusty Reedy Creek/ Gralyn loop at Umstead. (For those of you who don’t live and run in the Raleigh-Durham Area, the Umstead Reedy Creek/ Gralyn loop is the hilly-ass place you go to do all your Boston training long runs.)

It was good to be back. The perfect cool, overcast day for a woodsy long run. My goal was to get through it and not totally fall apart and/ or wimp out on the hills. I managed to keep the hilliest miles (8, 9, and 10) under 8:20 pace, which I felt pretty good about considering the fact that I’ve definitely clocked some splits that start with 9s out there in recent history. As always, watching Saffron zooming up the trail waaaaayyy ahead of me was both inspiring and mildly demoralizing. But mostly inspiring. :)

The nice thing about that loop is that the last 2 miles are flat, which is handy for salvaging both your average pace and your self-esteem. We did this particularly effectively today because we threw in a few pick-ups at roughly 12.25 through 13.25. These did not feel as awful as I feared they might, and they certainly moved things along a little faster.

All things considered, I felt pretty good about Boston long run #1. Cheers to the return of Sunday Funday!

So there you have it, friends! Week 1 of 2014/ Boston training was filled with puppy-like enthusiasm and glorious optimism for an exciting new year of awesomeness, at least as far as running goes. Here’s hoping I can ride this little wave of excitement and positivity all the way to Hopkinton!

What are your big, awesome running goals for 2014? Have you started training for them?

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: Wasabi training logs

Wasabi’s Guide to Writing an Amazing Race Report

Posted by Wasabi on December 16, 2013 Leave a comment

You'll be sure to get an A+ on your next race report with these 6 helpful tips from Wasabi!
You’ll be sure to get an A+ on your next race report with these 6 helpful tips from Wasabi!

In case you missed it, Salty Running is holding an exciting little contest this month. Participating is easy! All you have to do is send us your awesome-est most triumphant/ disappointing/ hilarious/ embarrassing race report ever and you could win A FREE PAIR OF SHOES and other cool Salty swag to boot! I am here to help give you a little leg up on the competition with a handy guide to writing your most amazing race report ever!

Whether you have a 2013 race you want to report about for our contest or you just want to know how to write a good one for all your 2014 pr performances, read on for some pro-tips on writing a highly captivating and entertaining race report (and don’t forget to thank me when you win that new pair of shoes!) Read more >>

Categories: Training Basics
Tags: race reports

Wasabi’s Training Log – 12.8.12

Posted by Wasabi on December 9, 2013 Leave a comment

Here's a pic of Wasabi and a bus, 'cuz homegirl has been riding the proverbial running struggle bus all over town lately!
Here’s a pic of Wasabi and a bus, ‘cuz homegirl has been riding the proverbial running struggle bus all over town lately!

Holiday greetings, Salty readers! I have a little confession to make. I kind of haven’t been loving running all that much lately. I’m stuck in that weird no-man’s-land part of the year where my goal race for the fall season is several weeks behind me but several weeks still separate me from the beginning of spring marathon training, and it’s left me feeling pretty unmotivated when it comes to running. So please bear with me if this week’s post seems a little lame and whiny, and if you are privy to the secret to staying excited about running year round, even when there is no big, shiny goal race looming on the calendar, please share it with me in the comments!

Despite my grumpy pants attitude towards running as of late, I did manage to muster up 42.10 unenthusiastic miles this week. You can read all about them here, and in the meantime I’ll work on reclaiming some motivation so next week’s training log can be filled with fun, happiness, rainbows, and butterflies once again.

Monday, 12/2, 4.06 miles. Felt pretty alright on today’s easy-peasy  group run after a Thanksgiving travel-induced 3 day running hiatus. Just some leisurely miles with the work peeps. Good to be back on the horse!

Tuesday, 12/3, 6.04 miles. 6 miles on the usual greenway trail with my #1 run buds, Kara and Amy. They were doing 4x 800m at HM goal pace and 4X 200m at 5K pace which I tagged along for, but didn’t take splits or anything serious like that. I was a little reluctant on the faster stuff at first, but eventually decided that it felt good to go fast-ish without getting too crazy. Just trying to strike a balance between getting some rest and recovery and maintaining the motivation to continue running consistently. Easier said than done!

Wednesday, 12/4, 7.16 miles. I wish I could say that my easy hour run felt a little easier, but it really didn’t. Not that it felt terrible, I’m just still struggling with the whole getting excited to get up and run thing these days. I guess this is somewhat normal for this time of year, post-goal race but not yet really training for the next big thing… Just wish I could conjure up a little more excitement and motivation… Ah, well. I’m sure this funk will pass. In the meantime it was good to get things done.

Thursday, 12/5, Rest day FTW!

Friday, 12/6, 5.5 miles. It wasn’t easy and it took some mean, self-loathing messages from my multiple iPhone alarms to coerce my feet into finally hitting the floor, but I actually dragged my arse out of bed and went on a pre-work run all by myself this morning! Yay me! The lackluster running drudgery continues, but at least I’m making it happen! Hooray for perseverance, and checking it off the list!

Saturday, 12/7, 8.0 miles. I kind of made up the time and distance for this run because the new TomTom GPS watching I am testing out for work crapped out at roughly mile 3. (Just because I forgot to charge it, not because of technical problems.) I know we were at 4 miles and 32 minutes when I turned around, so I just doubled the time and distance for the final numbers.

I was pretty excited to realize that I did not for one moment hate this run, thanks to the pleasant company of my usual Saturday donut shop group run pals. The 2nd half was solo for me since everyone else was running longer, and I even did a few little pick ups at the end just for kicks. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of the end of the post-season slump!

Sunday, 12/8, 11.33 miles. Despite cold, rainy-ish weather, I enjoyed today’s long run more than I’ve enjoyed any other run I can recall in recent history. This was probably mostly due to the excellent company, courtesy of Saffron, our always-hilarious friend Caren, and Emma, a refreshingly darling and delightful high school junior who will be training for Boston with us. It probably also didn’t hurt that I was wearing some seriously awesome dirty sock gloves, since only one of my actual gloves decided to show up this for this little long run adventure. Guys, socks keep your hands surprisingly toasty! You should try that shit, for reals! In any event, I was really pumped to feel like a happy, pleasant person for the entirety of 11 miles this morning! I’m going to go ahead and call it a comeback!

Shout out to these Swiftwick socks for keeping my hands surprisingly warm in the absence of my gloves on Sunday!
Shout out to these Swiftwick socks for keeping my hands surprisingly warm in the absence of my gloves on Sunday!

So, in the end it was not so bad. Here’s hoping that the little flicker of positivity and enjoyment I managed to find at the of this deary little training week will continue to snowball a big pile of fun and enthusiasm in weeks to come!

Have YOU found yourself in a big, grumpy training funk? What was your strategy for getting out of the bitter barn and back to playing in the hay?

Categories: Training Logs
Tags: Wasabi training logs

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