First half of 2020 - in the books

Yesterday I wrapped up the first half of my 2020 running with a 10 mile run. All in all, it was a reasonably successful block of training. I accomplished my hill workouts, got a speed block in and remained more or less healthy for the entire time. Should be in decent shape heading into my next block which is a fall marathon - if we have any of those.

February and March I did the 8 week hill work - which starts with a 6x60 and progresses to 2x(45,90,120) session. I also managed to achieve the elusive strava 2000 meter hill climbing badge for the first time ever. I haven't exactly kept up with the hills using these workouts since then - but do have to do about 200-300/run whenever I run from Arlington - so it does establish a decent base. 

Next up was some flat (thank god) speed sessions. These showed nice progression as well. My first 2-miler was a 13:56 in early April and my first 3-miler was a pokey 21:30. Over the course of 8 weeks and and lots of tempos and intervals, I brought those down to 13:04 and 20:27 - which I'm pretty happy about. My mile fell to 5:54 from 5:50 last year - but I think given covid and the hot weather that day - probably comparable.

 Finally, I remained ok health wise. I won't claim this as a great win given my foot stil feels like crap some days - but nothing awful as yet. It did pretty well with yesterdays 10-miler. Knees felt a little weird at times as well - but seem to respond to the knee brace which i use on occasion. I'm now entering the first part of my 16-week marathon block - hope to put in some miles.

 I actually started this 2 days early - with the 10-miler. I also have some back yard ultra training to squeeze in this week. But other that that - pretty much 5 days a week, with one long run and a pretty easy tempo. It's pretty much the Hal Higdon level 2 plan. This looks like most of the emphasis is on the tempo/long run on back-to-back days and then has two xt/rest days in between an easier 3 day block of just 5 to 10 mile runs. Those start out pretty easy - so I'm throwing this backyard ultra into the mix early on. Goal is to not get injured - bail out at the first inkling of foot soreness or boredom.

6-3-3 done

Yesterday I completed the 6-mile; 25 minute rest; 3-mile + 3 mile later in day runs. Since I'm in no-type of ultra shape - I just want to get some practice doing sequential runs. Nothing interesting to say about the experience. Weather was nice! Two more weeks of unstructured training left. I definitely feel better mentally when i have a decent goal in mind.

Off-weeks

I'll begin marathon training 6/29. As such, the next few weeks are fairly unstructured. I'm pretty tired of doing speedwork, but do want to keep doing a tempo a week. Last week I nailed the 2-mile tempo. Today I attempted my third 3-mile tempo of the speed-block. The first one I did back in early April (21:30, ~7:10 pace). The next one was late April (21:00, ~7:00 pace). I was really just aiming to match that time today, but did much better (20:27, ~6:49). I'm really happy with that - as it is much better than my historic 3M tempo paces. In addition, today was very humid and I had my mask up for a good chunk of that - so if we could run 5k races - I feel i'd be in pretty good shape. This weekend, I'll be trying a 6-3-3 over the day. The plan is to run the 6 - take a 20 minute break - then run the next 3. I'll then try another 3 miler later in the day. Starting to think about the backyard ultra - which I'm going to suck at - but would like try and do 25 or 29 miles.

Mente Mile 2

The second mile did not turn out too hot. I decided to switch my strategy to try and keep an even pace - which I did. 1:30 laps pretty much the whole way through. The problem, of course, is that I really needed those to be 1:27s. I may try the mile once more - but I think I'm done with the formal 'speed work' part of the year - and I'll transition into backyard ultra training. This should be a bit more fun - and start to lay down a larger quantity of miles.