Photo by @themcchronicles

I’ve been posting a lot about approaching my training differently leading up to PHX, and this week was the perfect example. Typically, I would just knock out distances leading up to race day and give it my all on the course. This time around I’ve been working in hills, cross training, and focusing on keeping pace. Let’s take a look at the last 5 days:

Monday:

Tackled Mt. Diablo. An almost 7 mile climb up with a 3,800+ elevation gain… and what do you do when you get to the summit? Snap a couple of pics and run back down. The climb took me almost 2-hours, and was more of a run/hike situation. I was really focused on doing the run DOWN aggressively to work on my downhill running for PHX and made it down in less than an hour.

View from Mt. Diablo summit.

Tuesday:

Legs obviously felt the run from the day before, but I wanted to get in some more work to help build off tired legs. I ended up heading over to the gym and doing an hour on the stationary bike. I wasn’t really sure how this was going to play out, but I wanted to get in some more leg work without the impact on my feet.

Working on that bike thing.

Wednesday:

Had penciled this day for a shake-out run, but my legs were feeling it EVEN more and decided to take a rest day instead.

Thursday:

20 miles. I was conflicted on whether this run should be held at a decent pace or if I should simply be running it to get in the distance. I have really been working on strong runs, but 20 would be the furthest I have done in some time. I decided to split up the distances to try to see if I could focus on my splits. I ran the first 12 miles around a 8:40 pace and kept it pretty consistent with doing the same loop 3x. The next 4 miles I worked to get the pace down to just below 8:30 and felt pretty good. At this point, I had ambitions of dropping the hammer and nailing the last 4 even faster, but just couldn’t pull it off. I found the 8:30 pace again and then just fell off from there.

The legs were still pretty fatigued from the beginning of the week and my quads were still feeling the downhill scream on Monday. I got in the 20, but if I could have stopped at 18, I most likely would have — not sure if that’s a benefit/downfall of an out-back route.

Threw on Pro Compression socks right afterwards, they hug so good.

Friday:

30 minutes of hills with November Project. This run happened only because of the love of the NP community and the motivation to get back out there. It was a simple up/down route on California Street in San Francisco at 6:30 am and the perfect opportunity to chase Cable Cars up/down the street. I didn’t bring my watch, so I don’t know how far I ran, but I think I got in 5-6 up/down laps.

Left: California Street in the background, cheer tunnel like a boss. Right: The walk to coffee with an amazing sun rise.

The weekend?

I’m not sure what my weekend will look like, but I’ll most likely try to get in some short distance tempo work. I think I hit my quota this week for hill training, so I may try to see if the legs have some short bursts of speed in them. This would be the quality over quantity thinking. Typically in the past I would have asked my legs to do another long run at a much slower pace.

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Recently posted:
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How has your training been going?