I recovered pretty nicely from Charleston.
This was my last week with my running coach. With no major goals or big races on my radar, there’s really no point for me to have a coach. She’s been great, though. She had me ready for New York City in 2017 (it’s certainly not her fault that my stomach had other ideas that day), and she did the best she could trying to get me ready for New York City in 2018 (if nothing else, I think that without her I probably would have ended up over 6 hours). She gets to leave on a high note, though, she definitely had me ready for Charleston. (No, I haven’t finished my race recap.) I’m fundamentally a better runner after working with her.
Of course, now I might not be so diligent about jotting down notes after runs, so my weekly wrap-ups might suffer. We’ll see.
I started looking around at some other races, and while ultimately I decided not to sign up for any, I noticed a few races had moved around. The Hot Chocolate 15K (They do races in a bunch of different cities, I believe last year was the 1st year they’ve run it in Charlotte, but I was in hernia surgery recovery mode so I missed the first one) which had been in mid-February last year, was Saturday (as in yesterday as I write this), the Charlotte 10 Miler was moved from mid-to-late February up to the beginning of February, and the Joe Davis 10K/5K, normally early January, will be in early March this year (but like in 2018, both races start at the same time, you can only do one race unless you’ve got a time machine). Like I said, I decided not to sign up for any of them (I’ll have a separate post explaining why, although I probably wouldn’t have signed up for the Hot Chocolate 15K one week after Charleston), I just thought that was interesting seeing all these races moving around.
Weight Check: 169.3 pounds, down 1.2 from last week. Woohoo! That’s still higher than I’d like, but getting below 170 definitely gives me a small psychological boost. In a week where I didn’t have a whole lot of miles and I went out to eat 4(!) nights in a row, that’s excellent.
| Day | Scheduled | Total Miles |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday | 3 miles easy | 3.11 |
| Friday | 3 miles easy | 3.11 |
| Saturday | 3 miles easy | 3.11 |
Total: 9.33 miles
I guess I’m going to have to reformat that table, since I no longer have any kind of training plan.
My coach recommended that I wait until Wednesday to start running again. As usual, I think she had the right idea.
Wednesday was cold, 31 degrees. My legs weren’t completely recovered, but they felt good enough. I was definitely a little slower than my previous weekday runs, which I expected, but it wasn’t too bad. I did gradually speed up as my legs warmed up a little in more ways than one.
On Friday, it was pretty close to the same weather as I saw in Charleston last Saturday, but it’s not as bad when I’m running 10 fewer miles. My legs seemed to have recovered. I was pleasantly surprised and had a nice speed up on the last mile without pushing too hard until near the end.
Saturday was cool and damp with occasional mist, but no rain. My legs felt fine. I was a little slower on the first mile than on Friday, but I was a little faster after that with a nice push at the finish.
Next week, well, I’m on my own. I figure I’ll run 3.1 miles Monday, maybe 4 on Wednesday, another 3.1 Friday, and 4 or 5 Saturday. It depends on the weather, of course. It’s supposed to get really cold this week.