Adventures of a female master runner in Metropolitan Washington, DC.
The weather was cooler than usual for my 18-miler on Sunday. On Tuesday, the temperature rose to the mid-70s for my 600m repeats workout. Due to near 80-degree heat, 7 miles @ goal marathon pace became marathon effort. After a check-up on Wednesday, I felt confident that whatever was negatively impacting my training in the fall of 2019 resolved itself but I have a long road back to my former fitness level.
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It was my birthday week! When I return to racing, I will be in a new age group and in the GRANDmaster category. There was near record-breaking heat this week but I still ran well. In fact, I turned in my first sub-10:00 pace long run of the training cycle.
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It’s officially summer! The temperature reached 85 degrees by the end of my 19-miler on Sunday but a cool front moved through mid-week making the other workouts much more pleasant. In fact, the paces for my interval workout on Tuesday and my marathon-pace run on Thursday were both faster than they should have been.
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It was a relatively cool weather week and it led to some great workouts. On Sunday, I completed the “Arlington Loop” for my long run and felt like I could have gone further. On Tuesday, I ran 1000m repeats on the trail as fast as I’d done shorter intervals. And on Thursday, I cruised through a marathon-pace run.
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This week, I started setting pace expectations for my runs. Sunday’s long run was only 16 miles so I wanted to run it faster than usual but the weather didn’t allow it. The heat also made my “speed” workout fairly slow. But I completed the runs and by the end of the week, had confidence about completing my workouts in the heat.
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Despite being over-dressed, I finished my first 20 miler of this training cycle on Sunday! The run ended with me shuffling so two days later, I ran short intervals to get my legs turning over again. Closed the weekly workouts out with a good threshold run on Thursday.
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This week, I started what will be my typical schedule for this training cycle – long run on Sunday, speed work on Thursday, and a “medium” run on Thursday. It was a rough start, though, as high heat and humidity led me to run 18 miles on the treadmill! The other runs were outside, though, and went well.
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This week, I would be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 with Wednesday marking two weeks since I received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine! I started this training cycle easy, though. On Sunday, I ran a 16-mile long run around Arlington, Virginia (my hometown) and on Thursday, I did a similar route for an 11 mile “medium” run.
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Back in December, I started what was to be an 18-week training cycle with the notion of potentially running a spring marathon.
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So much changed in my world in the 13 weeks since my last post back in February when I tripped on a piece of metal near the sidewalk during a run, breaking two fingers and severely skinning my knee in the process!
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