Quality hour

I felt pretty good this morning so I decided today would be a quality day.  The 30 minute recovery yesterday must have done the trick.  The legs felt better and the soreness was gone.  I’m still amazed at how much time it takes between ‘good’ workouts to fully recover.  Running by feel seems to be taking on an increasingly important role in my training.

 

Since I’m using my last cycle of training as a starting point in this new cycle I’ve decided to shorten the quality portion of the workouts.  I want the stimulus but not the peak.  In hindsight, I see those 20 mile hard workouts were run just a few weeks too early.  The recovery time was pretty lengthy and I couldn’t hold that level of training for very long before I started to slide somewhat.  But all is not lost.  It was a good peak and one builds on each cycle.

 

I have a print-out of Canova’s suggested workouts so I decided to do the low end of one of them this morning.  It called for an hour progression divided into thirds (20/20/20) going from 85% to MP.  I figured that would come to about 9 miles total so I did 3/3/3.  I wasn’t far off and finished in 58:01.  I think my last 3 was a little harder than MP effort because I mistakenly ran the 2^nd third too quickly.  Oh well.  I was just happy to be able to increase the pace at mile 6.

 

Felt ok during the run.  The 3 mile warm-up prior to the hard stuff helped.  Certainly not feeling as fit as I was a few weeks ago but I was still pleased to be doing quality.  There was a lot of traffic again this morning with the ship in at the port.  A dark, drizzly morning didn’t help anyone’s vision or my visibility so I felt crowded again.

 

A little over 2 miles to cool down and a good one in the books.  Easy running tomorrow then I’m traveling for a couple of days so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get a run in or not.  I’ll take my stuff just in case.

 

14.1 miles w/9 mile progression @ 6:27 average.