Happy Sunday! It’s been a low key weekend.

Friday night I spent a majority of my time cleaning and doing laudrny.  The things I never seem to have time to accomplish during the week.

 

We had a wonderful post-birthday celebration with family last night. My poor husband had to work the night shift on Friday night, so he was so tired. He is such a trooper for being there with me!

It’s the little things right?

 

Oh, and he spoils me with running birthday gear too!

 

I talked on Friday about adjusting my training to focus again on 10k training. As I mentioned, I did this before my last marathon training and it seemed to really help me when it came to speed.

The last time I used this plan from Runner’s World. I don’t remember how I found it but it did a nice job of incoroprating speed and lowering mileage.

Weeks 1-5:

Weeks 6-8:

 

I am not quite sure how next weekend will work while we are in Boston, so I may end up repeating a week in there somewhere.

I am going to miss my long run on the weekends for the first couple weeks, but it does eventually build up to 12 miles. That’s pretty good for a 10k plan.

That’s why I enjoyed this last time. It is a total of 3 “speed” workouts a week. These vary in intensity so they aren’t all out all the time. They also incorporate some longer easy runs which help in keep your based up to an extent.

The plan does not specify paces. I used my Hanson’s Marathon Method book and wrote down the paces it suggests for the distances above per my next marathon goal. That means a lot of these will feel really hard, but some of them will still be based on effort.

 

Here is what my week in training looked like:

Monday

I hadn’t yet decided I was going to convert to the 10k plan, so the weekend started out with an easy 6 miles.

I finished the last mile with 8 x 10 second strides. Thankfully the plan called for 5 miles with strides, so I wasn’t too far off!

 

Tuesday

I decided on the plan officially Monday night, so started right into it with my first workout!

The plan actually called for 2-3 mile warm up, 8 x 400 with 400 recovery and a 2-3 mile cool down. I was just beginning so I didn’t want to be overzelous so I cut the warm up and cool down a bit.

I ended up with:

1 mile warm up
8 x 400 (6:31 pace or 1:38/each) with 400 recovery
1 mile cool down

Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate (or any morning for that matter) so I had to use our treadmill at home. It was a total of 6 miles.

Wes proceeded to get on after me and now it no longer will turn on. It’s a sign I need to quit using that thing for now.

The paces felt challenging but not over the top, exactly what I was hoping for!

 

Wednesday

I got up Wednesday morning and ran 7 miles easy. My legs felt pretty much dead for a majority of the time.

I’m used to running after workouts, but when it comes to workouts on the treadmill it’s a whole different game.

 

Thursday

My final workout of the work week was a Fartlek. I talked a little bit about it on Friday’s post.

The weather didn’t cooperate again so I ended up at the gym at 5:00 am.

5 minute warm up
45 minute fartlet (1 minute on/1 minute off, 2 minutes on/2 minutes off – repeat for 45 minutes)
5 minute cool down

The “on” pace was a 7:24 and the “off” pace ranged from an 8:49-8:57. In total I completed 6.7 miles.

 

Friday

Per usual, Friday continued to be my day off. A great day for recovering and getting ready for my weekend runs.

We did have a quick froyo trip before Wes had to be at the hospital. Dessert is always better before dinner right?

 

Saturday

I really struggled Saturday morning not pushing out the run further than it said. The schedule shows 8 miles.

I’ve been consistently running 14 miles for the past several weeks as my long run, and it a lot of ways my Saturday run is therapy! 2 hours of therapy.

I reminded myself 3 days of speed work is no joke, and set out for the scheduled 8 mile run. It was still therapy, just much shorter!

In total it was 8 miles. It wasn’t as great as I had hoped for, but it was outside in the beautiful weather so that made it pretty awesome.

 

Sunday

The planned workout for Sunday is:

Warm up
20 minutes fast tempo
Cool down

The plan is to run the tempo run between a 7:25-7:30 pace. I’m not used to Sunday workouts, so this should be an interesting change of pace! See what I did there? Ha!

 

In total I hit around 40 miles this week. Pretty low considering my recent averages, but three of those days consisted of pretty intense work. I’m OK with it.

Looking forward to the week ahead and heading to Boston!

 

How were your runs this week?

Have you ever taken a break from long runs to focus on speed?