Weekly Wrap-Up: August 22-28

Well, that was a week, and a weekend, too. (Mostly good, except for my phone dying and getting replaced.) Since I didn’t get home until 10:00 Sunday night, my wrap-up is a day late.

My recap of the 2016 Yiasou Greek Festival 5K is coming later this week. I know I said I’d re-post the recap from my marathon this week, but I changed my mind, and first I have to re-post my write-up for the 2014 OrthoCarolina 10K, which, up until Saturday, was the hottest race I’d ever run. I’ll definitely bring that race up when I write about this weekend’s race, so I figured I’d better provide some context first.

The good news is I don’t have to change my banner. The bad news is, that means I didn’t get a new 5K PR. I’ll have some more thoughts on that in my race report.

My new shoes came in on Thursday. (I’m still not crazy about the lime trim, but the Brooks logo is silver with a black background, and that looks pretty cool. They’re growing on me.) Of course, they showed up at the Midtown location of Run For Your Life, and I had to go to the University location for packet pickup for my race, so my trip home from work Thursday took a little longer than usual. On the plus side, they were doing a customer appreciation promotion, so with the purchase of my shoes. I got a free tech t-shirt, and I chose green. I finally have a shirt I can wear when I run on St. Patrick’s Day. With my shirts from previous races, I had every other color covered. (Actually, I have 2 red shirts, 1 purple, 1 gray, 2 white, and about 50,000 blue shirts. I don’t understand all the blue shirts either.)

Weight Check: Since I wasn’t home Sunday morning, and I wasn’t able to write this until Monday, I decided to use my weigh-in from this morning, which was 163.5. That’s up exactly 1 pound from last week. I suppose it could have been worse. I did pretty well most of the week. I did have a Coke on Saturday, and two on Sunday, but in each case I was driving and wanted to stay alert. There was plenty of food (and beer) when I got together with some college friends over the weekend, but I tried not to go overboard. This week should be a little more normal. Maybe.

Total: 36.52 miles

I ended up skipping my 3 mile Saturday run. According to my co-worker who created my training plan, that run was really just to shake things out after my race. My legs felt fine on Sunday (and Monday), so I guess I was OK to skip it.

On Monday, the weather was still bad, but not quite as miserable. My legs didn’t have a whole lot of energy. I did OK, I guess.

Up until Tuesday, Charlotte had a streak of 30 straight days where the temperature never dropped below 70 degrees. It’s insane. It was 68 degrees on Tuesday morning, finally breaking the streak. It was the best non-Portland weather I’ve seen since June. It was still a tough workout. There are too many intervals for me to post all of the splits, but they were all under the goal paces, and the very last interval was my fastest, with a pace of 6:58/mile(!).

Thursday was another 7 mile midweek easy run. My plan has a lot of those. The temperature was back up to 70, but it wasn’t completely miserable. I ran relatively well.

Friday I couldn’t just stop at 3 miles, I had to get the 5K distance. I’m not sure why I went all the way to 3.12 miles before stopping. Funny, my Garmin also registered 3.12 miles for the race on Saturday. *cue Twilight Zone theme*

As for Saturday, you’ll have to wait for the race report later this week. I did cut the warmup short just to give myself a little extra time to cool off before the race, and I added that half mile to the cool down.

Next Week: (which has already started)
Monday: Easy 7 (Already done. Hot and humid.)
Tuesday: 3 mile warm up, 8 x 1:00 Repeats (9:00/mile pace) with 2:00 recovery, 2 mile cool downThursday: Easy 7
Friday: Easy 7
Saturday: 14 miles LSD

It’s supposed to cool down a little bit later this week. We’ll see.