Two Weeks of TC 10 Mile Workouts

My last TC 10 Mile training update was some intervals from 2 weeks ago. It's been a busy 2 weeks, so here are some updates on a few key runs...

I've been giving up on any hard mid-week runs. MAYBE I'll do one this week, but I'm focusing on getting a good hard long run early in the week, and then a good speed day later in the week. I feel like I need an easy run in the middle without ALL of my runs being hard.

My long run 2 weeks ago was a 2.5 mile warm-up, then 5 harder miles starting at 6:30 pace and descending each mile, and then about 4 miles easy as a cool-down. Last year, I ran those "harder" miles with a nice descend of 6:29, 6:20, 6:09, 5:52, and 5:49 (totaling 30:39 for those 5 miles). This year, I ran each split just a bit slower (without trying): 6:30, 6:21, 6:10, 5:58, and 5:54 (totaling 30:53). This honestly felt like a WIN! I was happy being just 0:14 slower than last year for the same workout.

My speed workout 1.5 weeks ago was a descending 4 mile tempo run. That's a few miles to warm-up and a few miles to cool-down, with hard descending miles in the middle. Last year, I ran 6:04, 5:51, 5:45, and 5:42 for that descending 4 mile tempo. This year, I ran 6:19, 5:56, 5:50, 5:36, which was about 0:21 slower than last year. I had TOO big of a range this year: that first mile was way too slow, then I was able to kill it for the final mile. Sandbagging. D'oh.

Half-mile splits: easy through split #4, then hard to the south (split #10)
and back to split #12 to end the tempo. Then easy the rest of the way home.


Pace chart. You can see the quick turn-around (at split #10) with 1 mile left in the tempo.

My long run last week was SIMILAR to the one from the week before, but this one focused on just 5 HARD miles in the middle - not necessarily "descending" miles/splits. I warmed-up for 2.5 miles, "built speed" over the next mile, and then ran a hard 5 miles before a cool-down. Last year I felt like it was a failed run - it was one of my worst training runs leading up to the 10 mile in 2024. I ran those hard 5 miles in 30:02 last year. This year, I felt pretty good about the entire workout, but I let my mind wander too much for a half-mile split in mile 4, and that makes me feel like I ruined the entire workout. My mile splits were 6:11, 6:00, 6:00, 6:14, and 6:05 = 30:32 (0:30 slower than last year.) That 6:14 was nasty. If I could have kept that more like the 6:00 splits of each of the 2 miles before that, I would have been 0:16 slower than last year, which would have felt better. It didn't feel like a FAIL... but it also doesn't feel great being that much slower than a workout that I considered a FAILED workout last year.

And my final speed workout last week was some fartleks. It's hard to compare those, but I tried to run those on the exact same route as last year (out-and-back from home, turning around near the 3.75 mile mark), and I ran on grass at times. It was a 2 mile warm-up, and then some random hard fartleks with 50% of that fartlek as easy running before starting the next effort (so a 3 min effort would be followed by 1.5 mins of easy running). I did efforts of 3, 2, 4, 1, and 5 minutes, and then I started that over again with a 3 and 2 min effort before stopping (because that was about 30 minutes of fartleks).

I ran 4.76 miles over 30:17 of fartleks last year, and I did 4.70 miles over 30:14 this year. (I lost 0.04 miles during my "easy" running, and 0.02 miles during my efforts.) Again, a bit slower than last year, but I'm OK with giving up those 0.06 miles this year. Here's the guts of my workout:

A U-shaped out-and-back starting from the SE corner.


With the fartleks labeled: hard efforts of 3, 2, 4, 1, 5, 3, and 2 minutes.


My pace with those 7 efforts labeled.

So, overall, these times over these last few weeks have been “appropriately” slower than last year - it’s about what I expected coming into this training block. I can’t be too disappointed in any of this.

One thing that has been dragging me down over the last week is how BEAT I’ve been feeling. I woke up on Tuesday morning (the morning after my last long run noted above) with a “training readiness” of 1 on my Garmin:

Yikes. I’m usually around 60-75 on the scale of 1 to 100.

And then on Saturday morning (the morning after my fartlek run), it was 1 again. Six of the last 7 days it's been in the single digits, with Friday morning reading a bit higher (like around 20). But my Garmin has been recognizing that something has been “off” lately. I’ve been sleeping decently, but my HRV has been low for the last 10 days or so as well:

The dotted line drops off starting about 10 days ago.

I took a nap on Saturday for maybe the 2nd time in the last 5 years or so. Trying to feel better and keep the training strong!