A Brutal Workout During the Middle of an "Easy" Week

This is the end of my only "easier" week of training leading up to the TC 10 Mile and the "Loony Challenge" in 3 weeks. The timing of my recent achilles injury meant I had to consistently build and not back off my mileage for a rest week in the middle, so I told myself I'd try to throw in a week where I scaled back the intensity a bit. But I was feeling good after a moderate run on Tuesday, so I decided to do a harder run on Thursday. I did a Coach Jen Harrison workout from the 2 months she trained me leading up to my only sub-60 10 Mile in 2010.

It doesn't sound bad, but if you do it right, it sucks: it's 6 x (3 mins hard / 3 mins moderate).

The brutal part is you have NO time to recover. It's not 3 mins hard and then 3 mins EASY. So the 3 mins hard is brutal PHYSICALLY (obviously), but the 3 mins moderate is nasty MENTALLY. You can't ease up.

I did 8x(3/3) first in August of 2010 under Jen, and then again last August as I was gearing up for last year's TC 10 Mile and Loony Challenge. Five years ago, I covered about 7.23 miles over those 48 minutes, and last year, I covered 7.10 miles in the same workout. But that workout (48 minutes of hard running) is too far for me to be going right now.

A few days ago was my 3rd time doing 6x(3 mins hard / 3 mins moderate). I first did it in late Sept of 2010 (about a week before the TC 10 Mile) and covered about 6 miles. I did it again last year leading up to the Loony Challenge, and I covered about 5.5 miles (it was no secret that I wasn't in as good of shape as I was in 2010 - I don't know if I'll EVER be!). Finally, I did it 2 days ago and ACTUALLY COVERED A LITTLE MORE GROUND THAN LAST YEAR: I went 5.70 miles.

Here's a graph of my 6 intervals from Thursday:

5:43.0 average pace "HARD" interval, 7:01.8 average "MODERATE" interval.

Then I added in last year's version of this workout in lighter red and lighter blue:

My HARDs were all faster this year except for the last one, and
my MODERATEs were all faster except for the 5th (where I was climbing a hill this year).

That last moderate was REALLY slow last year, and it was still quite slow this year. I finished my final HARD effort, and as I was TRYING to keep a moderate pace on Thursday, I saw my Garmin told me I was currently going at 14:xx/mile pace. Yikes.

This is the FIRST time I can point to a workout that was FASTER this year than last year. I'm not about to say that I'll run the TC 10 Mile faster this year - this was just one workout. But it feels good to be seeing better numbers!

When I tweeted about the workout, Steve Q asked what "moderate" was, and then I got PRAISE from Caesar herself:

Follow Steve Q and Coach Jen on Twitter.
(Oh, and this was before I figured my ave speeds: I needed to add 20 secs to my moderate pace.)

That hard run was Thursday. Yesterday (Friday), I hit the trainer for nearly an hour during the boys' nap. Today, I'm not doing anything (maybe just a few PT leg exercises and stretching). And hopefully tomorrow I'll have a good 9.5 mile long run! It's 3 weeks until the big race! Actually, in exactly 3 weeks, Pharmie and I should have just done the TC 10K and 5K, and the TC 10 Mile (and Marathon for Pharmie) will be the next morning!