This week and for the next 17 weeks, I am focusing on speed training.
Since my knee is still injured this works out very well actually. My knee hurts mostly when the mileage increases. So by keeping my week light in mileage and focusing on speed I am actually giving time for my knee to heal despite the intensity of each workout.
On Tuesday, I resumed my competition with Tom.
The workout was 8 x 300m with 30 sec recovery at 5:30 min/mi target pace.
The first 3 intervals felt okay, but at the end of the 3rd, I realized the difficulty of the workout was not to maintain a 5:30 pace but to do so while keeping recovery time to a minimum. After a fairly hard run, a 30 second recovery is gone in a blink. After 8 reps I calculated my pace at 5:23, beating Tom's performance of 5:30 min /mile and even-ing out the score 2/2
Wednesday, I went for an easy 10k with the dogs on my usual trail. From the beginning of the run I felt a diffuse pain in my knee so I kept a conservative 8 to 8:15 pace. The knee felt actually better after 5 miles but I decided to keep the mileage low to allow for recovery.
Today, was another speed session. A 4 x 600m with 3min recovery between reps. Goal pace to beat Tom was 5:40min/ mi
This was another tough session, and in the last rep, I felt like I was really giving my max. Cardio-wise, I was maxed out, even though my legs could have gone a bit faster. I completed the workout at an average 5:30 min / mile pace giving me the edge on Tom.
At the end of week 2, the score is as follows:
Me: 3 Tom: 2
One thing that has not worked well for me this week is my weight control... I have reached 65.2kg this morning...Definitely not going in the right direction despite logging in each calorie eaten. Either my transit is lagging, or some food labels are inaccurate...To be continued...
Tomorrow, I am celebrating Halloween with friends but I will try to do an easy 10k or so before then. This week end I also need to start adding some mileage if me knee allows it. I am running another marathon beginning of December and I have not run serious distances in quite a while...
