Plan was to do 10 with 8-mile tempo at HMP at Sugarhouse Park. Started with a 2-mile easy warmup around the outer loop, then moved to the inner loop for the tempo portion. Splits were as follows:
Mile 3: 5:55 (168 bpm) (one hill)
Mile 4: 6:05 (176) (two hills)
Mile 5: 5:59 (177) (one hill)
Mile 6: 6:22 (179) (two hills and the wheels are coming off)
Mile 7: 6:13 (178) (one hill and the wheels are completely off)
I only made it another 1/3 mile before calling it quits on the tempo. My legs were burning, I felt anaerobic at the top of every hill, and there just wasn't anything else in the tank to hold tempo. I finished out the 10 miles at an easy pace and tried to figure out what was wrong. Here's what I came up with:
I've been getting adequate sleep at night and have been drinking a lot of water at work to stay hydrated. One thing that may have factored into today's difficulties is the fact that this is my third all-out workout in 5 days (Sunday morning's 14-miler with 10 at MP, then Tuesday morning's intervals). I think the problem runs a little deeper, though.
This was really only my second attempt to maintain tempo on anything other than downhill terrain, and I think it revealed the inadequacy of my base, which I've been able to mask by doing my tempo work running down Emigration. I'm a pretty good downhill runner, so I've kind of been cheating myself by using downhill runs and counting them as true tempo. I feel like I'm trying to build a 2:30 SGM on a base that would only support 3:00. Compared to 3 years ago, when I last trained for a marathon, I feel like I'm lacking in the base mileage to recover properly from one hard workout to the next and to sustain a hard pace for more than a few miles on honest terrain. I think it might make sense to reassess things and increase mileage for a month while pulling back on the frequency and duration of intense workouts, then try a workout like today's again to see whether the increased mileage has made a difference. When I last trained using the kind of workouts I'm trying to do now, I had a solid base built over the course of the winter plus a dozen or more runs of 20+ miles (including 4 marathons) over the previous 6 months. When I did tempo at Sugarhouse with that foundation underneath me, I was able to sustain a hard pace for 6 miles (I don't recall ever doing a longer tempo run there) with little trouble. The focus then was on increasing turnover. I feel like I have better speed now but a far lesser ability to sustain it. Compared to those workouts, today's felt like a death march. | 