Sunday - bike ride
Monday - rest day
Tuesday - "quality workout" (i.e tempo run)
Wednesday - bike ride and/or easy run
Thursday - easy run (around 15 kms)
Friday - bike ride and/or easy run (around 9 kms)
Saturday - long run (up to 20 kms this coming weekend!)
Now the little glitch to this plan this week is that on Tuesday when we were supposed to get up at 5am so that we could get our run in before the heat and humidity of the day we turned off the alarm clock, rolled over and went back to sleep until around 7am!!! Okay, so no problem, we figured we'd make up the run later on in the day. Hah! Fat chance! The day just got hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. So we ended up ditching the workout all together yesterday.
So that meant that today (Wednesday) we had to squeeze in a tempo run in the morning. We dutifully got up at 5am and were out the door shortly after 6am for the tempo workout. So far so good. But according to some of the running books that The Man uses as our training bibles (the Daniels' Running Formula being at the top of that list), our "tempo" pace should be around 4:50min/km. Well, this is where the use of my Garmin is proving the adage that a little bit of information can be a dangerous thing. I mean, imagine yourself out there running as hard as you can, but then you look down at your Garmin to find out that your pace is actually your "easy" pace, and you're supposed to be going about 45 seconds quicker. Well what do you do? If you're me, you have a mini-breakdown on the inside ("I'm a failure..." "Why can't I run?" "What's wrong with me?" "I can't do this..." etc. etc.) and then just run as well as you can and do your best to forget about what you *should* be doing in terms of pace. In fact, if you're me, you switch your Garmin from the pace setting to the heart rate setting so that if tempted to look at your wrist, you will only see what your heart rate is (and thus avoid being disappointed by your slow pace). I found that strategy was much more helpful (I mean "helpful" in the sense that I felt less like killing myself). During the "tempo" sets (two sets of 15 minutes) my heart rate was 162 for the first set and 165 for the second set. It was around 147 during the easy warm up and cool down parts. I figured that was a better way of gauging myself instead of fixating on pace that was just depressing me.
The run stats for today are:
Ran for a total of 1:27:00 for a distance of 15.11km with an average pace of 5:41min/km (and that average pace was determined by:
-45 mins of easy warm up running at 6:00min/km
-15 mins of tempo, with 3 minute easy run break, followed by 15 mins of tempo
-10 mins of easy cool down running at around 5:50min/km)
So today's run wasn't really a tempo run, but it was a run, and that's worth something. And it was a run based on heart rate, and if you've got your heart in the right place, you can't go wrong...can you?
**Note: The graphic is from the University of Minnesota's website that offers information on working out in the heat: http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2004/UR_18942_REGION1.html
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