Posted by Derek Lee-Wo on May 9th, 2007 in Training

For the past week or so, I seem to have been struggling with my running, having to take walking breaks which is rather rare for me.

My kids and wife have had the cold for the last couple weeks, but until the last few days, I was fine.  I’m hoping that the reason I’m struggling is because I’m not 100% healthy.  E.g. today I woke up with a sore throat, but that’s the only symptom I’ve had so far…no sneezing or runny nose.  I went out for an easy 4-5 mile run and about 0.25 miles into the run, I came pretty close to vomiting.   I pushed on and took it half-mile at a time and eventually ran 4.5 miles

Yesterday was supposed to be an 8-mile run with 4 miles at tempo pace.  It was tough and after about 3 miles I was starting to wonder if I should abandon the run.  I took a few walking breaks and turned the speed workout into a fartlek.  Like today, I ran it half-mile at a time.  I’d run a quarter-mile at tempo pace and do a quarter-mile recovery walk/jog.  I managed to repeat that until I did the 8-miles.

Sunday was a medium-long run of 12 miles.  This is the longest I’ve ever run, but I’ve done that distance about 4 other times.  I ran it an average 10:15 min/mile pace.  It’s not my slowest for the distance, but the last time I ran 12 miles, I did it at a 9:55 min/mile pace.

I have an easy 8-mile run tomorrow.  I’ll see how it goes.  If I struggle through it, I may abandon my Saturday run and take an extra rest day.

I’m hoping I’m struggling because I have (or am getting) the cold.

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Posted by Derek Lee-Wo on May 6th, 2007 in Chicago, Marathon, Training

The second week ended on Saturday and went quite well.  The call of the road was too much and I ended up adding in an extra recovery run on one of my rest days.  I also ran a little extra on some of my other runs.  In the end, I ran 38 miles instead of the 32 miles that was actually scheduled in my training plan.  I still only ran 5 days for the week so I had 2 rest days.

The plan this week (and for all future weeks except for the odd recovery week) calls for 5 days of running.  Since that’s a frequency I’m comfortable with, I don’t expect I’ll be throwing in any more additional runs, but I may still tack a bit on to the end of some of my planned runs.

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