This week is about reining it in a bit. I pushed myself a bit too hard on cadence drills last week and my hamstrings are reminding me of my mistakes. That, plus running a parkrun AND a 5k race, both of which having hills, was enough to create some real soreness in my legs.
This morning’s workout is another Run Walk Run from my grandaddy, Coach Jeff, with a 2 mile run this go around. I opted for 90/30 splits instead of 60/30 this time, just to see how it felt. Turns out, it felt alright. If anything, running 90 seconds instead of 60 helped me develop a better cadence, which was solidly in the 158-162spm range when I ran. This feels like it will become my “easy run” cadence and this training is helping me to find that.
It kind of feels like Coach Jeff’s training plan is just to get me to a healthy baseline, rather than ramping things up for a 10k. This makes sense the more I think about it, as I need to have stronger legs and endurance to run farther, and running longer (at this point) isn’t going to help. Nobody runs the full distance of their race before their race, after all, so me running consistent 2-3 miles for the next few weeks before, I hope, gradually building up to a 4 or 4.5 mile run, feels like what I need.
My only regret is that I wish I had opted for a 4-day training plan and incorporated parkrun into it. I’m not sure if the Garmin Coach thing recognizes that I’m also running on Saturdays too.
Anyway, the rest of the week are drills. I think I’m going to do at least one going east (aka 3% uphill) because I desperately need to train hills, and 3% is a slight enough grade that I don’t think it’ll hinder my progress at all. Next Tuesday is another RWR at 2.5 miles. Not entirely sure why GC isn’t putting these on Sundays, which I marked as my long run day, but whatever.
The plan for drills is easy and slow this week. My drills last week were too fast and my hamstrings are mad at me. My first and fastest split then was 6:15/mi-ish pace–wild!–but I really do think I overstrided and probably pulled my hamstrings a bit. So every subsequent run will be done easily, except I suppose for the Lilac Run, which I may purposely run slow on just because. We’ll see. Race day is race day, after all.
I do hope that GC eventually gives me some alternate workouts. Drills and RWR are fine but I know they have hill workouts and other stuff loaded in there somewhere. Put me in coach! I’m ready to play (clap clap clap) today!