Buttsweat Towel© season has begun

74F, 94%.  6 @ 8:59 AP.  Ran around the construction in the neighborhood - there are a lot of new roads that have been cleared, but not paved, and the packed dirt makes a great running surface.

Oh, I forgot to post this yesterday, but it's important.  As I was running shirtless down Potranco road, a lady slowed down to yell "WOOOOOO!" at me.  This makes 2 times now.  in my lifetime.  I looked, and there is unfortunately no tracker for this on the blog, which is weird.  I mean it's a much more important metric than sleep, shoe miles, weight, etc.

AM:  76F, 89%.  8 @ 8:22 AP.  Legs are still shot, so it's looking like a Wednesday workout, not Tuesday as I'd hoped.  DP is forecasted to be in the 70-72 range on Wed, so I MIGHT even be able to get away with some mediocre mile reps without wanting to quit after the first 2.

PM:  91F, 4 @ 8:37 AP.  oooowwwww come back to me, legs.

AM:  73F, 89%.  8 @ 8:11 AP.  Some really spread out strides over the last 2-3 miles.  It is really taking my legs a long time to feel ok in the morning.  Like 45 minutes + of jogging before I don't feel terrible.  The first 15-20 minutes has always felt rough in the morning but it's reached remarkable levels now...like barely-making-it-up-hills levels.  So I'm not sure what's up with that, but the strides actually felt semi decent.  So I'll give the mile reps a try tomorrow; hopefully it'll be cooler like it was this morning.

PM:  89F (H/I 93F).  4 @ 8:36 AP.  Post-Carl's Jr run...when will I learn?  I'm pretty wiped out and don't even know if I should bother going to the track tomorrow, but I probably will anyway.

AM:  75F, 89%.  6 miles. Workout fail at the track today - went out for a 6 x 1 and I got through 1 rep.  I ran a strained 6:21 and pretty much walked off the track right then, almost unconsciously, it was pretty abrupt.  I've had plenty of workout fails but that one was pretty spectacular.

AM2:  When I got to work it was still 6:30, so instead of doing actual work, I hopped on the TM for 5 more, and added 10 x (1 minute on/off).  Now THERE'S a workout I can get used to.

I'm not ready to give up on the mileage experiment yet, but I'm close.  Over the past 18 weeks, I've averaged 77+ miles/week and it seems like it's not doing anything.  I just get a little slower every week.  I've been assuming that your body will eventually just adapt to anything but maybe not.  I could call this a long base phase, hit a couple months of speed work @ 60-65/week, then back to high mileage before my 50-miler and probably be fine.  But first I want to try cutting the long runs back to 1 every 3rd week.  I'll also move most of my PM runs to the TM, keeping 1 or 2 outside for heat conditioning.  Hopefully that combo will give me enough life to get me through the summer, but if not, I'm ok scaling back until October.

PM:  meh, that's enough for today

AM:  74F, 88%.  5 @ 8:43 AP.  Thought it over, read some articles last night and concluded I need to change it up a little, and cycle my running more, even if my next big race is a 50 miler.  Job 1 is to dig out of my current hole with some short, easy days.  Then I have a few plans, most of which I hatched on this morning's run.  I'll post it once I've plotted it out a bit more.

PM:  4 slow ones on the TM.  I think this will help - it's a lot less effort than doing it in the heat.  I will still try to do 1-2 a week outside in the afternoon to keep up my heat conditioning.

AM:  76F, 88%.  5 @ 8:49 AP.

I sketched out the next 4 months or so.  One upcoming problem was that I am taking the kids to Florida in early August by myself and probably looking at 4 consecutive days with no running at all.  My solution to that is a supercompensation cycle (Jul 27-Aug 16; 3 weeks).  Should be ok as long as I go in with rested legs.  Next up is a 6-week 5k training cycle (Aug 17-Sep 27).  Then a 6-week block of ultra training, followed by a 2-week taper.  This is about what it'll look like, extremely subject to change:

Decoder ring:  italics is a double.  Underline means to add in strides somewhere.  I've never planned strides before but I'm so bad about doing them that I thought maybe I should.  The other thing is that I probably run ~5-10% fewer miles than I plan for (on average) when I draw it out like this, due to work/life demands, so that cushion is included.  My wife and I are probably going on a cruise to Jamaica in October (pending childcare) so that week is kind of a question mark - 10 miles/day is pretty optimistic but with my race so close, maybe I'll be inspired...

PM:  4 poky TM miles.

77F, 87%.  7 @ 7:48 AP.  Last mile was a net downhill 5:40.  Legs aren't completely broken, but the first 6 miles still felt pretty bad.  Going to cut back next week, and make sure I'm fully dug out of this hole before starting supercompensation.  I'd put the odds @ 50/50 that I make it through those 10 days without aborting, but I've been wanting to try it for awhile to see if it'll give me some kind of boost, and it seems like a good block for ultra training.