Buttsweat Towel© season has begun

45F, N 16-24 mph.  7:04 AP.  I dumped Pfitz for the time being and am following Mark Hadley's training methods for awhile.  Today's run was 15 @ steady state pace (zone 5).  What does that mean?  For me it's about 7:05-7:10 -- a pace that I always thought was kind of "no-man's land" but this guy uses it in the fundamental phase of training, before the marathon specific stuff starts.  Once I get 11 or 12 weeks out from Boston, these basically get replaced with MP work.

I enjoyed the run, and suppose I can even call it a "workout," which is part of the reason I like this guy.  Splts were 7:26, 7:00, 7:02, 6:58, 7:05, 6:57, 7:07, 7:05, 7:01, 7:09, 7:04, 7:06, 7:00, 7:02, 6:54.

I was not surprised to be able to complete it, but I was surprised how comfortable it was, 3 weeks after a full marathon in which I only ran 13 sec/mile faster.  Normally I still have marathon stink on my legs for 5 or 6 weeks, before I'm back to normal.  Maybe it was supposed to be somewhat easy though, I've never really tried anything similar.  Maybe the extended break after the race actually got me ready to roll sooner.  Either way, I'm feeling good about where I'm at right now; 2013 will hopefully the year of a bunch of big PRs.

34F.  8:06 AP.  Evening run.  It was 22 degrees this morning, which might have been ok, but the wind was blowing pretty hard so I opted to run after work.  I still have that luxury now, since my mileage is low and I'm not doing doubles yet.  Gonna have to get used to it eventually though; I think I might test the waters tomorrow morning since the wind will be down.

20F, 7:49 AP.  Little chilly.  Still wore shorts though.  One day I will have to break down and get running tights or something.  Today was not that day.

21F.  Down to the track today for 16 x 200m, with 200m jog recoveries.  The goal was my theoretical 1-mile pace, which I would round to a nice even 40 seconds/repeat.  I thought it might be tough to crank it down to that pace in the cold but it turned out not to be an issue.

Averaged 39.02s, which is about 5:14 AP; likely faster than I could run a mile but it's all a guess anyway.  Fastest was 36.7 (4:55 AP), slowest was 40.7 (5:27 AP).  Standard deviation of 1.02 seconds.  I had a lot of fun with Excel this morning.

A lot of times they would see-saw back and forth between 38 and 40; I could always tell in the last 50m if I had accidentally started out too fast; those were usually the 37-38s.  They would almost always be followed up with a 40.  Toward the end, they were more consistent.

Long, uphill "cooldown" back to my house, followed by some coughing and wheezing at home.

33F, 8:23 AP.

I'm moving up my Sunday long run / workout to tomorrow.  Danielle will be out of town from Saturday - Monday so it's either do it Friday or do it on the treadmill on Sunday while keeping one eye on the kids (no thanks).  Usually my legs need more than 1 easy day between stress days but I'll give it a shot tomorrow; I think it will be fine since it's a completely different stress (like 90 sec/mile different).

53F, S 17 mph.  7:13 AP.  I hopped on good ol' Watts road and did a long out and back (nice, lonely east-west road to minimize effects from the wind).  First 9 easy, next 8 as a "predator" GMP run.  Basically means center on your goal marathon pace (for now, 6:45) and do a progressive tempo around it.  So I wanted to start at 7:00, end at 6:30, or something like that.  The idea is to closer simulate the end of a race in the last few miles (it worked).

8 Tempo miles: 6:43 AP (6:56, 6:53, 6:49, 6:46, 6:42, 6:36, 6:32, 6:30).

Well executed run.  I was sluggish today, still not recovered from Wednesday (true speedwork always seems to take me a really long time to bounce back from) so I was happy to pull it off anyway.  To get the splits to work out like that, I had to really race up some hills.  Usually I let the splits fall where they may, knowing I'll make it up on the downhill miles but I decided to maintain pace going up today.  So although this is an AT workout, I definitely worked LT as well by the end, even if the paces weren't quite down there.

Good news about packing in the workouts is that I get a bunch of easy days in a row now, which I will definitely need.

8:34 AP - 7mph on the treadmill.  Danielle left a day early so had to start a 3-day treadmill odyssey today.

I got my updated Boston confirmation card in the mail yesterday.  Yep, I updated my seed time for the 1-minute PR I ran.  Obviously.  I don't want to be lumped in with all the lowly 3:01 people, you know.