General Aerobic + Speed: 8 miles w/ 10 x 100 m strides. 4:57 am, 40°F, 75% humidity, very slight SSE wind, overcast, wet ground from overnight rain, but not raining. The weather is definitely warming up. However, I don't trust March. We're likely to get a huge snowstorm before the month is over. I don't know whether that's in the extended forecast. That's just what usually happens.
I had some operator error with my Garmin this morning. I paused it when I stopped to scoop a pebble out of the ankle area of my shoe, and then forgot to start it again and didn't realize it until about 1.6 miles later. So I don't really have mile splits today, but I know that I started out with a 10:05 mile, and was running about 9:33 pace by the 6th mile. I did my standard 6-mile loop but ended at the middle school track instead of at home, ran the strides on the track, and then ran home to make it a total of 8 miles. My first two strides were on the curved parts of the track, but then I decided I wanted to run the strides on the straight-aways, so I did 200m of jogging, instead of 100m, between the 2nd and 3rd repeat to get myself straighted out, then ran strides on the straight-aways and jogged the curves. I think my average pace for the whole run was 9:30. Paces on the strides were 6:53, 7:10, 7:03, 6:59, 6:50, 7:10, 6:44, 6:57, 6:37, 6:41. I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to help kids with various things and get them out the door to school. The real problem was the 13-year-old who fell asleep reading last night and neglected to finish a project that he was supposed to have done by 1st period today. I didn't do the project for him, but I did give him some suggestions and a little bit of help this morning.
I forgot to look up a new proprioceptive cue before this run, so I just kind of thought occasionally about some of the previous ones during this run. Once I realized that I had had my Garmin paused, my mind was consumed trying to remember when I had paused it and calculate how much distance I had failed to record. In any case, here's this week's cue, from Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzgerald. It's called "Scooting." "Run in a 'scooting' manner by actively minimizing vertical oscillation. Don't exaggerate this action to the point where you are reducing your stride rate or increasing ground contact time. Just think about thrusting your body forward instead of upward while running. If it helps, imagine you're running beneath a ceiling just two inches above your head that will leave you with a terrible headache if you smack into it repeatedly throughout a run. This proprioceptive cue will enable you to run with greater stability by reducing vertical impact forces."
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