A Good/Normal Week of Training

Last week looked good in my training log:

About the WORST part of the week was my slightly shorter long run on Monday (as I was short on time). It was 10.6 miles, and as I noted in my "2023 in review" post, ALL of my long runs last year were 11 miles or more.

• MON: long run, good legs, and a short commuter ride. It was very cold on Monday, so I didn't bike to work (partly because I didn't want to and partly so the boys wouldn't have to stand outside of school longer in the cold air). But then I did bike to get Clark's ashes mid-day.

• TUES: good swim and good upper body. This was my (current) favorite swim of 3x400 and 3x200 (all broken up). I was dead half-way through, but held on for some decent splits.

• WED: 6 mile easy run, bike to and from work, and good core and legs. BIG DAY! And the ride to work was cold as it was 18 degrees with a windchill of 4, and I was into the wind on the way there to make it feel like a below 0 windchill.

• THURS: 1 hr 50 min trainer ride, and decent upper body. This was the first time in a long time that I biked before an upper body workout. I biked early and did 9x5 min efforts (totalling nearly 2 hours after warm-up and cool-down). Then a slightly quicker/harder upper body workout.

• FRI: treadmill tempo 5K, and good core and legs. I didn't know what I'd be able to run, but I was HOPING to be close to 17:00 (it's easier on a treadmill). I did a last-minute 17:55 treadmill 5K early this year, I NEARLY ran a low 17:xx about a year ago, and I ended 2022 with a 17:07 15 months ago. I didn't do any research on those workouts pre-run other than looking up that 10.6 mph was around 17:30, 10.8 mph was 17:15, and 11.0 mph was 17:00.

I started at 10.4 mph and sped up to 10.5 and 10.6 shortly. But then I felt like I had to hold that without going any faster for a mile. Then up to 10.7 and then 10.8 for a while. I topped out at 11.2 mph for the final few tenths. I was hoping to be faster than 17:22, but I'll take it:

The "distances" are long on the treadmill, so all
those splits are 0.5 miles with the last one being 0.1.

• SAT: good upper body and long-ish trainer ride. This is a normal Saturday: a good circuit for my upper body, and then a trainer ride later in the day. The trainer ride was 4x10 min efforts.

• SUN: core. Nothing fancy.