Philly Training: Week 4

It’s the point in my training when I’ve been running enough miles, and more importantly, enough hard miles, to lead to niggles and fatigue here and that.

The fatigue has subsided a bit since I became more consistent in taking my iron supplements, the niggles, though, are harder to deal with.

One of the weirder ones is a clicking noise when I walk. There is something in the metatarsal area of my right foot that clicks with ever step when my toes bend to push off.

There is also on-going soreness on the top of my left foot, which I think is tied to a recent effort to fix my ankle alignment. I’m not exactly sure what happened to cause the misalignment of that ankle, but for a while, my foot wasn’t striking the ground properly with each step. That’s fixed, but I think that means certain muscles in by foot are now reengaged and are getting used to being used again.

Anyway, here’s what the past week looked like:

As you can see, my big workouts this week were on Tuesday and Thursday.

Tuesday, was more half marathon-specific training, with 3 sets of 3 miles at half marathon pace with just 1k of recovery in between….and in the POURING RAIN. Seriously, I don’t know if I’ve ever run in such a consistent downpour before. It rained the entire 90 minutes of my workout.

On the first set, I averaged a 6:55.6 pace. On the second, a 6:54.0 pace, and on the final set a 6:54.4. I really wanted to call it quits after two sets, but I was really glad I stuck with it. My shoes took three days to dry out, though!

The second workout had much better conditions. After a warm up to the track, I ran:

Distance	Time	Pace
2400	10:09.1	6:48
1 Mile	6.36.3	…6.36.3
800	3:13.1	6:28
800	2:58.5	5:59

It was a good solid workout. I’ve really been enjoying time on the track lately. The last interval was kind of a spur of the moment hard effort, just to see if I could get sub-3 minutes after that workout. For reference, by 800 PR in high school was 2:41!

On Saturday, I got one last taste of Summer Streets for the year, running with two of my best running buddies, which really helps the time fly! This was a down week, so a nice 14.3 miles in 1:53:19 for a 7:55 pace.

Separately, you might have noticed two spin classes this week…that is training too! My boyfriend and I will soon be biking from Vienna to Budapest (about 25-35 miles/day), so I’ve got to be prepared for that as well. Stay tuned for lots of amazing pictures and tales of the journey!

Total: 45.7 mi.