My Week of Running

This has been a weird week for my mileage. I was going to say it's been a crazy week, but when I think about it, it's not so crazy. Maybe here I can explain what my typical weekly mileage looks like. Every Monday throughout this whole training, is a 5 mile run. Tuesdays are a faster shorter day, building up to 5 miles by the end of training. Wednesdays started off at 5, just like Monday but have been building up as well, and then there's Saturday's long run. Thursday I always try to do some other sort of exercise so I don't feel lazy, but Friday is ALWAYS supposed to be a complete rest day, as is Sunday. On Tuesdays, during the half marathon training, I didn't even run at first--I just did some other form of exercise like on Thursdays. By the end of half training, I had added 3 miles to Tuesday, usually at the gym.

So this week, Monday was 5 miles, just like normal. That run was completely standard. And it included a nice sized hill.

Tuesday, I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill. I did 4 miles at a decent 10 minute/mile pace. Later that day I realized I was supposed to do 5 that day. Whoops!

Wednesday, I was supposed to run 9 and I did. That run also had a pretty decent hill in it.

Thursday, when I normally would have gone to the gym and done about 30 minutes of elliptical and some weights (and then maybe a soccer game at night...), I instead went to a great open space preserve with two great friends and ran/hiked 8 miles. I guess this is the only part that felt crazy. We ran the first 2 miles and gained a few hundred feet, and finally I couldn't take it anymore and had to walk. We still had 2 more miles of uphill until we'd start going back down and I really felt like I was going to vomit from the exertion. I really stink at running hills, which makes me sad, but I just couldn't do it. After walking a bit we tried running again but I felt like I was having heart palpitations so we just walked the rest of the uphill part. That run/hike gained a little over 1200 feet in elevation over the first 4 miles. That IS crazy! To run anyway. It makes a very beautiful hike! There were amazing views of the entire bay area. We could even see Stanford and San Francisco from various viewpoints. And we were amazingly lucky to be there on a very clear day that was simultaneously overcast so instead of bright haze, we had a crystal clear view and the colors of everything looked so rich and deep! Anyway, we ran a lot of the downhill part, which actually had more of a rolling hill effect going on, so there were actually some more uphills in that too. Altogether, we ran about half of it, due to my weak hill running abilities. Sigh.

Friday I mostly succeeded in resting entirely. I went on a little walk with the kids to return something to a campus library. It was about 1.3 miles total, so barely noticeable.

Today, Saturday, the original plan was to run 14, but since I'd added 8 pretty intense miles on Thursday, I wasn't sure how many miles I was going to do. On top of that, it was raining this morning! My friend came out with me and did the first 5 miles with me, but after that I was on my own. I figured I needed to do at least 6 miles to reach the same weekly mileage level I would have been at if I hadn't changed things up. Of course, once I kept going I knew I could do more than 6! But at 6 1/2, my ankle muscle/tendon?/ligament? was hurting really bad. This muscle/tendon/ligament has had problems to varying degrees since I started training for my first half marathon in 2009. Today was the worst it's ever been. I stopped and tried to stretch it a bit, which just seemed to make it worse, and then I walked a few steps toward home, turned back around, turned back toward home, turned away again, and then it seemed like it'd be okay and I kept running, and continued on to a route that would require me to run over 11 miles. I ended up doing 11.5 miles today, in the rain the entire time. By the time I got home, I was really drenched. I only ended up wiping off my glasses about 7 times. (I meant to put in my contacts, but forgot.) I'm actually totally fine with 11.5 instead of 14 today because my legs really were feeling abused because of that extra run/hike on Thursday. You've just gotta roll with the punches, right?

Good job if you actually read all of that!

Next week, I'm doing 5, 5, 10, cross, rest, 20!!! That's a lot of miles! But the week after that I start tapering. Three more weeks to race day!