Boston Week 4 Training Re-Cap
I don't want to toot my own horn, but week 4 kind of kicked ass. I hit my mileage goal (36), nailed my track workout, took some active recovery, went to PT, made it to yoga twice and even squeezed in a CORE40 pilates class. While I managed to get over my stomach virus and avoid getting the cold the entire world seems to have, one area I did not dominate was pacing. Most of my "recovery" runs were too fast and my tempo run was way too fast and I had to cut it short by 2 miles. I blame this on the psycho old dude who got pissed when I passed him, sped up to race me and body checked me when he caught up to me (more on this below). I have never experienced this kind of aggressive behavior from another runner before and it totally got my adrenaline flowing so I ended up running 4 miles @ around 6:30 when I was supposed to run 6 @ 6:55. The goal for week 4 was routine. Being the first week back after the holidays I wanted to establish good habits and a routine that I can maintain over the next 14 weeks. I reduced my non-running classes to 3 a week - 2 of them being yoga. While eventually I want to be doing all of my runs in the morning, I just couldn't bring myself to do the tempo run at 5:30 am so I did it after work. I think week 5 will force me to get all my runs in before work because of a big deadline I have coming up.
Monday
6.2 Maintenance Run @ 7:55 mm
Tuesday
2 Miles warm up
6 x 800 (3:07, 3:05, 3:06, 3:05, 3:06, 3:05)
2 Miles cool down
Hot Power Yoga
Wednesday
15 miles of biking
PT
Thursday
2 Miles warm up
4 miles @ 6:33
2 Miles Cool down
Friday
Core40
Saturday
11 miles @ 7:20
Sunday
10 miles Biking (checking out "ghost bridge" - the Golden Gate Bridge was closed to cars for only the second time in its life)
3.7 Miles @ 8:10
Yin Yoga
Total: 36 Miles
My goal for week 5 is get in all my workouts and eat healthy despite a deadline at work.
Aggressive Old Man Runner
So... I have only had one altercation while running over the past 12 years and it involved a gang (literally.. a gang) of high school girls from Mattapan. This time, the aggressor was an equally unlikely demographic, kind, sweet, old grandpa. I was just starting my tempo mileage around Lake Merritt in Oakland and passed by the guy on the sidewalk. I didn't notice him again until i saw him out of the corner of my eye speeding at me along the dirt trail that runs along the sidewalk that also merges with the sidewalk every once in a while. He speeds up so that just as these two paths intersect, he comes up right next to me, bumps me with his shoulder, then proceeds to run right on my shoulder, basically as if we are in the first 400 meters of a cross country meet ( while there was in fact plenty of space everywhere). Now, I know I can't possibly imagine what it feels like to be a big macho dude and get passed by a tiny blonde pixie, but it can't really be that bad can it? (Dudes, back me up here). Of course, I am not one to take things lying down so I proceed to give some hand gestures that show my displeasure with the situation and he only continues to ride my shoulder and mimic me so I "politely" say something along the lines of "excuse me sir but why are you running so close to me" (translates to "what the f*%k is your problem" & "Did you really need to cut me off") and sped off as he had to stop gasping for breath. I am all for a little friendly racing on the trails but this was not friendly at all and reeked of the kind of attitude that Katherine Switzer had to deal with - only of course not quite as bad since the guy didn't actually try to tackle me. Ironically enough, my father-in-law got me a mini pink pepper spray which I had started carrying on my dark evening runs, only luckily for that guy, I forgot it on Thursday night.
