First 5 Weeks of TC 10 Mile Training

This is sort of a follow up to last week's "August in review" post about a HUGE biking month. August was also my official kick-off to TC 10 Mile training. I was ready to start in mid-July, but the Raspberry Run (and then recovering afterwards) kept me from starting 2 weeks earlier.

I did a post like this 2 years ago when I re-used Coach Jen's workouts from 2010 (those are the only 2 years I went sub-60: 59:05 in 2010, and 59:23 in 2024).

Only this year, I'm comparing 3 years worth of times. So RED TEXT means I was slowest of all 3 years, ORANGE TEXT means it was the middle time of the 3 years, and GREEN TEXT means it was my fastest time of the 3 years of doing these "Coach Jen" workouts for the TC 10 Mile:

That first workout was a hilly run from Jen, and that kinda screwed up my calf a bit which is why the next 3 runs were all non-Jen runs. That scared me and made me COMMIT to making sure every Wednesday run was just an easy run.

So then I re-kicked off the "Coach Jen" workouts with my fastest 4 mile tempo. But that could have been "artificially" fast as it was a FLAT trail.

For the 3rd week, I posted about both of those hard runs in the same post. Feeling good about the training!!

The biggest mental shift happened after the start of the 4th week. I cranked out a PR for that 2x10 minute effort on my long run and was suddenly looking at 3 out of my last 4 runs being PRs for those TC 10 Mile workouts! I was hoping to do some Coach Jen workouts as to not look too shabby at the TC 10 Mile after an injury in January and again in April. I was NOT thinking about racing WELL at this race... until just after that run!...

... but then I started turning in some slower times. That mid-summer heat came back, and I had some hot steamy runs that really sucked. I had my stickiest run ever just before the start of this training, and we had a few more bad days in later August. The 8 x 3:00 hard / 3:00 easy wasn't a hot day, but it was extra hilly. And I turned in the worst performance ever for that workout.

And that final full week was split (as I posted about both of those runs in this post): I had a GREAT long run on Monday, but then a hot and slow tempo run on Friday... that run on Friday was 90 sec slower than the last time I did it. Ouch.

Finally, I never posted about that last long run in August on the 31st, but that one felt OK. It was humid, but I felt like I did OK for the conditions. Coach Jen really likes to descend workouts and have me get faster throughout, but this one was just a FAST 5 MILER in the middle of a long run. No descend. Just fast from start to finish. In the humidity, I cranked out a 30:30 for the middle 5 miles (with no mile split dropping below 6:00), and like I said, I felt OK with that. I ran a 30:02 two years ago, and a 29:26 in 2010, so it was my slowest ever. But not depressingly so.

Bottom line: after a big month of training, I couldn't expect any more than what I see above! If at the start of the month you'd have told me that I'd do 8 Coach Jen workouts in August and run the fastest version of 4 of them, I would not have believed you. We'll see what these final few weeks hold, but I'm happy with how things have been going. I'm not looking to drop below 60 again, but I'd be happy to post something faster than 1:02:00, and POSSIBLY even shoot for sub 1:01:00 on a perfect morning. Lots of workouts between now and then though...