Wednesday, July 28, 2010

A dilemma + a decision

Not earthshaking. But I've been dwelling on this little dilemma off and on all day.

Here's the dilemma. Last week I took two days off to heal my ankle (and it helped a lot), leaving me with three days of running for the week (about 27 miles). No biggie. It was the right decision.

This week I have Thursday and Friday again designated as non-running days, this time to mini-taper and rest my legs for the Anacortes half marathon. Today I have been second-thinking myself, wondering if I should run a little tomorrow, maybe just a half run of three to five miles.

The pros--calorie burn, plus relieves the boredom of spending a long time on the elliptical at the Y.

The cons--less pre-race recovery for my legs, don't like short runs and probably would not even get warmed up over three miles. Plus it's not like a last-minute run two days before the race is going to have any training benefit.

The decision--don't run. The benefits of having rested, fresh legs far outweighs any dubious training value of a slow, pointless run. Plus running just because it burns calories borders on disordered thinking, I fear.

So the Y it is. I can't bring myself to rest completely, but low impact is the next best thing.

I don't know for certain whether I'll run on Sunday or not, but even if this is another 3-day week I'll still hit at least 30 miles with the half marathon (plus warm-up) distance.
Today after a 6-mile easy (slow) run, I went to the track for six quarter-miles. They started out weak and finished great! The first one was an 8-minute pace--ugh. I kept gradually speeding up toward 5K pace. I originally thought that my last one was 7:25 pace, which is OKAY, but when I downloaded my data I realized that had been lap #5. My final pace was actually 6:50! Woo hoo! One of these days (maybe after I get my Newtons) I'm going to run a sub-7 full mile. Yeah!
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