Shorter Week: Injury and Easter

Last week started decent, but then went down the crapper:

That PURPLE on Wednesday and Friday was noting some left calf pain. That's my oldest injury (been dealing with it since high school), and it flared up a bit on Wednesday's easy run. Then it was OK on Friday's run, but was achy all day after, so I haven't ran at all since. I'm taking off this entire week, and we'll see what Monday brings.

For last week, just shy of 20 hours of training isn't HORRIBLE, but it's the lowest since mid-Feb. I got in some decent bike workouts on Tues and Thurs before skipping the weekend because of family events. (And actually, it could have been that 19 mile ride on my MTB followed by an hour on the trainer on Tues that "weakened" my calf and led to the pain the next day - that's the ONLY thing I can think of that would have caused that.

• MON: normal long run and PT legs. The middle "pace miles" of my long run were at 6:17 pace, which is very average.

• TUES: 8x upper body and back-to-back rides. This was more of my "start outside on my MTB and then end inside on the trainer to get in a longer workout" idea that I wrote about at the end of my "March in review" post.

• WED: easy run, good PT legs and core. Random calf pain near the end of the run.

• THURS: 8x upper body and longer trainer ride. Got in some good stretching after that ride too.

• FRI: failed tempo workout. It was cold on Friday, and I was afraid of ice for my early morning run. AND I was afraid of being a few miles from home if some calf pain came back, so I kept my run on the treadmill. BUT THE FUNNY THING IS THAT OUR TREADMILL SPEED SETTING HAS BEEN ACTING UP. There are "preset" speeds of 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, and 12 mph where you can just hit a button, and then there are the UP and DOWN arrows so you can dial in a specific mph (to the tenth-of-a-mph). The arrow buttons have just stopped working. So I started by warming up at 9.0 mph before it let me hit the down button a few times after a few minutes so I could warm-up at 8.2 mph. When I was planning to run hard for 3.1 miles, I cranked it up to 10.0 mph, but I couldn't get the arrows to take me any higher, and I kept trying a few times EVERY MINUTE. It never budged. Finally, after 2.4 miles at 10.0 mph, I hit the preset to take me to 12.0 mph, or 5:00/mile pace. I held on to that for a final half mile, but couldn't muster out the extra 0.1 miles to make it a 5K. So I ran 3 miles in 17:30 (3:00 half mile splits for the first 5 splits, then a final splits of 2:30).

Graph: fast warm-up, 2.5 miles at 10.0 mph, 0.5 miles at 12.0 mph, cool down after that.

The buttons worked ONE LAST TIME so I could bump up my cooldown pace from 6.0 mph to 7.0 mph.

• SAT: quick upper body early. Then family time.

• SUN: nothing. Just family time and eating lots of sweets.

Last week will put an end to my weekly streak of 1500+ intensity minutes that lasted 8 weeks:

Nice last 8 weeks. Actually 10 weeks of decent "intensity time" back to a mid-Jan trip.