Getting back to Boston

Intervals at Ben Geren. Warmup, 1.5 miles at what was supposed to be 10K pace, 1 mile interval, another 1.5 at 10K, then 2ish cooldown. Total of six laps of the trail, or 7.67. Ran the reps at 7:43 and 7:31 pace, which is almost what I wanted. Can't complain too much, though; it was hard enough just to run that fast. First tempo intervals of the cycle; hopefully it gets better from here.

Total for the week: 55 plus. First 50-plus since April. Not sure how long it's been since I did 55.

Six miles plus strides at SHS. Didn't know if I was going to run. Went to Fayetteville today to see T, got back here and immediately took a nap, still felt groggy when I woke up, but decided to go try it. Run got me going, I was able to run low-9 pace and it felt pretty easy, then I ran strides for the last two laps. Totaled 10K plus about 100 yards back to the car; the Garmin read just 6.22, meaning 10K, so it was about 1% low again.

Trying to decide whether to add a longish run tomorrow or just stick to the script for this week which assumed I'd be working. See how I feel, I guess. I've done pretty well running 12 straight days, so I may skip the day off for a few days.

Decided to take advantage of the day off and get in a long run. So I devised a loop that I could do once for an 8-miler, twice for a 14-miler, and didn't seem horribly hilly. Some hills, but not like, say Oucho's. Or so I thought. By the end of the second loop, it seemed every bit the equal of Oucho's.

Left the Casa, went down Waldron to Rogers. Then the loop started: Continue south on Waldron, work around past Hardscrabble and Southside, up Old Greenwood to Rogers, down Rogers back to Waldron. Then repeat. After the second loop, went up Waldron to Free Ferry and returned home that way to push the mileage up over 14. I did a pretty good job of maintaining the pace through most of the run, but the last two miles the legs were dead. Even then, I kept the pace in the 9:30s, which is darn good considering how little energy I had left. Definitely an HTFU run. Overall average pace: 9:20.

Exactly three months until Boston. All I have to say is, I'm glad Boston's not in March. I'm gonna need just about all of those 90 days to get ready.

Ice bath afterward. That may have hurt as much as the 14...

Recovery fish tonight. Still quite sore, not much sleep, 13 hours at work today. It was a struggle, to put it mildly. Got through it, though. We'll see what the weather does tomorrow before I decide whether to take the SRD. Might need to save that for next week with the trip to Branson with Mumb and Pupe. See how work goes, too.

Ladder intervals after work, in the dark, at the SHS track. Get there to discover that quite a bit of the track is still covered in snow -- and that, worse, some of the snow melted and refroze. Slipped enough on the warmup laps that I wasn't sure it was safe to run intervals, but decided to try. Plan was 1 mile - 1K - 800 - 400 - 400 - 800 - 1K - 1 mile, with the miles at 10K pace and the 400s at 3K pace. Didn't quite work that way. The miles ended up being at MP, and the second 800 and 1K were reversed because I lost count of the laps on the 800 and ended up running 1K (it's bad when you can't count to two and can't remember where the heck I started). But I got it all done. Mile paces were 8:07/7:53, 1K were 7:30/7:30 (amazingly), 800s were 7:05/7:37, and 400s were 6:16/6:32. With warmup, cool and 200 jog intervals, total of 8.76. Still some slipping in the intervals, but didn't pull anything or wipe out.

Recovery run at SHS. Took about three miles to loosen up after last night's ladders. After that, was able to run a decent pace, got down to 8:30s for the last mile. I probably shouldn't have run that fast, but I didn't want to spend all freakin' night out there after working 12 hours -- so I sped up to save a whole six minutes. Woo hoo! Got it done, anyway. Tomorrow, eight miles including 2 X 2 at 10K pace. Let's see if I can do that -- and if the weather permits it.