All I do is sleep

[Day 153]

Things accomplished today: Woke up, went to practice, came home, ate breakfast, promptly fell back into bed and just woke up again. Good job Jess lol. Doubled up yesterday, so here's the summary from yesterday and today!

Yesterday's PM Workout: Easy run, 4 mi
Summary: 4.34 mi, 42:00, 9:40 pace, 176 spm
Pace splits by mile: 10:05, 9:29, 9:53, 9:41, 8:21
Hit Rate: 18/23 (78.2%)

This was way harder than I thought it was going to be. My legs just didn't feel with it, it was a struggle for most of the way until we did a little pick up push at the end of the run. Henry pretty much pulled me the entire time. I know he has a much easier time running with me when I'm beside him but I spent a lot of the run tucked in behind him because my legs just didn't feel like they could go any faster. It was rough. But whatever, we got it done.

Today's AM Workout: CMSC practice, IM day
Summary:

• WU: 400 swim, 3 x 100 swim
• Main Set: I have no idea what any of the pace times were, I was just going last and leaving 5 off the person in front of me...
• 4 x 150 @ base + :10/:15, 100 fly/50 back, 100 back/50 breast, 100 breast/50 free, 100 free/50 fly
• 4 x 100 @ base + :10/:15, 50 build stroke/50 recovery choice
• 4 x 50 @ base + :10, 15 underwater fast/35 recovery choice
• (break)
• 4 x 150 rolling IM @ base + :10/:15 (pretty sure these were on the 2:50?)
• 4 x 100 @ base + :10/:15, 25 stroke FAST/25 recovery choice (pretty sure these were on the 1:50?)
• 4 x 50 @ base + :10, 35 moderate/15 sprint to the finish (pretty sure these were on the :55?)
• Did these 1-3 free as written, 4 easy b/c ran out of time lol
• Total Distance: 3100 LCM

Hit Rate: 19/24 (79.1%)

Swam a lane up today, was definitely the slowest in the lane and really hope I wasn't ticking my lane mates off by being too slow. They seemed fine though, they left on whatever interval they were doing and for the most part I made all the pace times so I wasn't really holding people up I don't think. And I wasn't THAT much slower than the second slowest person in the lane lol. I'm gonna try to stick it out and see how things go with swimming in this lane. I don't even know what base pace they were using, but whatever it was, it worked for today.

I'm feeling stronger in the pool than I was expecting to. I mean long course fly is non-trivial but I managed to make an okay go of it. I had some pain in my right shoulder today but it's because my hand tends to deviate outwards on my freestyle catch, especially when I'm breathing to the left. If I'm careful about my freestyle form, my shoulder holds up fine, so I guess it's a good thing that it nags at me when I swim poorly. 

My legs are less sore today than they were yesterday for sure, but they're still keeping me up at night and they're definitely far from perfect. Gonna try and take that tempo run today, I feel pretty confident in my ability to at least hit the HM pace intervals, but less sure about those 10k pace intervals...just gotta remind myself that how I feel is probably not gonna be an accurate reflection of what my body is capable of and I just have to not freak out and focus on holding good form and get after it even if it seems way harder than it should be. Hopefully things will go alright. I'll report back in the PM.

Much love,

Jess

Long run and short swim

Yesterday afternoon/evening was an interesting adventure in varying states of exhaustion. I went for a long run during Coen's hockey practice. I was aiming for closer to 12 miles, but there came a point on Old Tecumseh when I would have had to cross the road, which was sort of busy, and then run a bit and come back and cross the road again, and I was at mile 5 and tired and just turned around. So I only got 10 miles. In the evening, when I was talking to Henry about it and voicing my concerns that I hadn't run far enough, he just sort of laughed like literally nobody thinks, "Man I ran 10 miles today I don't think it was far enough". And I guess he has a point. I finished fairly strong (my last mile split was much quicker than the rest, which was fairly smooth paced throughout) and I didn't feel like I was going to collapse or die at the end, so I think I have the extra distance in me if I go for it. It was a sort of slow run though which worries me a little bit because I am definitely going to try to take it out around 9:00 pace during the race and for some reason I have no confidence in whether or not I'll have the ability to hold that. We shall see...

Yesterday's Afternoon Run Workout: Long run, 10-12 miles.
Summary: 10.09 mi, 1:38:39, 9:47 pace.
Pace splits by mile: I didn't turn my auto lap timer on until about 2 miles in, so the first two mile splits are the same pace value. 9:37, 9:37, 9:57, 9:58, 9:52, 9:47, 9:56, 9:57, 9:52, 9:18, 8:54.
Hit rate: 9/11 (81.8%)

So in hindsight I realized that I took a slightly different route than what the race course will be, but it's close enough to be a good preview of what race day will be like. The nicest thing about Windsor running is that it's super super flat here, which makes holding a pace much easier. The course interestingly felt very long on the way out and significantly shorter on the way in. When I'm racing I'll have to remind myself not to get intimidated by how long things feel on the way out, since everything seems to move quicker on the way back in. Otherwise, it was a solid run. My legs were hurting from the very beginning, but settled into a rhythm and even though it was a slow one, it was one I was happy with given that I had a hard track workout the night before. Fingers crossed that things continue to feel good going into next week. And maybe the back half of my long runs might even get a bit quicker? We'll see.

I felt okay immediately after my run but honestly the more time went on the more exhausted I got. I even fell asleep for a bit while Skyping Henry. So I figured if I continued to be this exhausted I would just skip the pool this morning and take my easy recovery run in the afternoon. But I woke up with enough time to go to the pool, so I did. My left shoulder is really aching, I think it's because of how Coen slept on my arm last night, which sucks. It was giving me a lot of problems during backstroke and kick and so I didn't push it too hard. I was also feeling generically lazy so I kept the set short and easy. It was sort of a cop out swim to be honest, but I'm happy enough about having just showed up when I really didn't want to that I'm willing to accept it.

Today's Morning Swim Workout:

• WU: 1000 SKIPS
• Main Set:
• 10 x 75 free pull @ 1:30
• 6 x 75 free swim breathe 3/5/7 by 25 @ 10SR
• WD: 100 swim, 200 kick
• Total Distance: 2500 SCM (55 min)

Hit rate: 10/12 (83.3%)

I'm slowly crawling my way back up to 90% in terms of hit rate. Above 80% though which is nice. I'm altering my schedule to cross out tomorrow's morning swim. It's a function of two things, I want to give my shoulder time to get better and I also want tomorrow's run to be high quality and focused. I have to sacrifice the extra training volume for the quality because Coen doesn't have hockey on Friday so I don't have a solid period of alone time where I can take my run unless I do it after dinner (which generally sucks because I don't usually have enough time to put enough time between dinner and my run) or in the morning before everyone is awake. And I generally swim in the morning. So the swim is probably going to be sacrificed in the interest of making sure my run workout remains high quality. And the priority right now is the running, so I don't feel too bad making that call. I'll try to get a few swims in next week as well. As of right now, the swimming is just some base work before I try to commit to very early morning masters practice once I'm back in STL anyways so I'm not going to stress too much about missing a single swim.

On the calendar for this afternoon is an easy recovery run. I'll aim for somewhere in the 3-5 mile range, nice and slow and even 9:30-10:00 pace (or slower). (I'm setting these standards now to make sure that I don't end up running a negative split 6 miler that finishes with sub-9:00 paced miles because I feel like working harder. Today is an easy day, it has to stay easy so that I have fresher legs in the tank for tomorrow's workout. It's important that I get tomorrow's run right, which means I have to commit to doing less today in order to recovery properly.) Yay! (:

Much love,

Jess