running for my mind

Scheduled rest day. 

I am excited to start my last week of training before tapering off. 

14 easy miles

This week is my last big week of training before I start my taper before the Ogden Marathon. I am excited to be wrapping up this training cycle. I have noticed one, of many, thing different this cycle, I have not gotten burned out like I did last summer. With that said, I am starting to get a little burned out now and I figured out why. Running alone takes its toll on me.

Last summer I trained completely solo. I don't think I did one run from May until September with someone else. This cycle has been almost the opposite. I have only had to run a couple of days a week max by myself. Since January I have ran with someone almost every day. Some days I ran only a few of my miles with someone, but at least I was not logging all of my miles alone.

All last week, I ran solo. By my 22 miler on Saturday I was a little tired of running by myself. I will likely run this week completely solo as well because Adam and Brayden are out of town and Tyler is crazy busy at work. It is not a huge deal to run solo, but I definitely found out what makes me get burned out a whole lot faster.  

10 miles - 2 mile warmup - 10 x 1/4 mile repeats - cool down.

I was a little cautious with this run because I started to have a slight pain in my quad after yesterday's run. It is on the inside of my quad on the right leg. It is a little over half-way up my quad. Yesterday it hurt during the day, which was pretty unusual. I did a decent job of rolling it out last night before bed and it felt pretty good this morning.

So, I headed out the door and stuck to the roads instead of heading to the track. I decided I was just going to do 1/4 mile repeats at some pace faster than marathon pace and see how the quad felt. About .5 of a mile into the run I could feel the pain in the quad, but it was not bad. I felt the pain when I would pull my leg to take a step. There was zero pain on impact or when I was weight bearing on my right leg. I decided to do the first repeat at about 6:15 and it felt fine. It actually felt a little better to run faster. So, I did 9 more repeats and they all fell somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 depending on the terrain.

On the 9th repeat I could start to feel that the quad was getting more aggravated so I decided 10 repeats would be sufficient for the day and I headed home. I am a little hesitant with the quad now and don't know exactly what is going on with it. I think it is just an over-use injury and it will go away soon. I am going to ice it up today and take tomorrow really easy. Luckily this is happening right at the time I need to taper anyway.  

[does anyone know why my monthly view counter doesn't work? it is not a big deal but it stopped working over a month ago. i messaged sasha but never heard back]

10 easy miles 

I stuck to about an 8:00 pace. The quad hurt the entire time, but it didn't kill. It felt a little better going uphill. Tyler told me to surge a couple of times going uphill to see how that felt and it felt fine. Any incline uphill seemed to make it feel better. Downhill maybe hurt a little more than flat, but not much more. Going to ice it throughout the day and take it easy. I plan on logging 10 miles tomorrow and Friday and then maybe 18-20 on Saturday. It will still be a strong week despite this quad issue. Then I can take the rest of Saturday off and all of Sunday. Hopefully I will be feeling a lot better by then. 

10 easy miles - 

I was surprised by how good my quad felt this morning. After a few miles I almost couldn't feel any pain at all. I decided that I better stick with the plan and take it easy though. By the end I was feeling great and even picked up the pace a little. I am still going to take tomorrow and Saturday a little easier than normal so I can make sure that this thing is completely healed.

11 easier miles

I was feeling pretty good on this run. Not 100% in the quad, but close to it. I started out thinking I would do about an 8:00 pace and gradually get faster. I continued to feel good so I just kept going. Decided to go an extra mile just for fun. I was sick of the 10s. :)

18 miles

I met up with Josh at Sugarhouse Park and ran up to Wasatch and over to the U and back. It was a fun run. It was nice to get to know Josh and have someone to run with. I also liked running somewhere new. Like everyone on the blog, I have a routine that consists of about the same routes so it was nice to mix it up. 

The first half included some decent hills as we climbed to Wasatch. It climbed 572 ft in 5.74 miles (according to Garmin data). Josh and I had talked about holding about a 7:45 average for the run so I was pleased that it ended up being a little faster. Josh is a solid runner and he pushed me so it was nice. 

The quad felt good. I could feel it a little at the beginning, but at about mile 8 Josh asked about it and I couldn't feel it at all.