CIM, Week -8

I'm about to go lie down and try to take a nap. This week, I skipped 2 workouts, and then, decided to try to make up for lost mileage by going hard on the weekend.

Overall, I think it worked out pretty well. But, predictably, I'm exhausted.

Yesterday, I did 9 miles in the San Jose foothills, including a total of at least 2,000 ft. of elevation gain and loss. It was slow, but a *very* difficult workout. It was all I could do to hold out 'til 8:30 PM before leaving a friend's birthday party (but showed up at 5 and helped cook, so that counts for something, right?).

Today, I woke refreshed from the full night's sleep, jogged to the start of a local 10K, and started with the super small crowd and managed to finish as the first female in something around 54 minutes (I took a wrong turn, so hard to be certain of what my actual finishing time should have been), and then jogged my way home. The day's total was a fun 10 miles, and the 10K portion was faster than my current guess at what makes sense for a target marathon pace (8:55?). Since it was the day after a major hill workout, I was quite happy -- this tells me I'm on the right track in terms of my goal pacing and fitness.

For comparison, I did a 10K in Bellevue last training cycle at week -6. It was (a) a minute slower, although much more hilly; (b) part of a week with almost the same mileage as this one; and (c) with 4 easy flat miles instead of 9 hard hill/trails miles the day before the race. I'm telling myself this means I'm much more fit this time around than last time. [And I'm hoping it's true :)]

Next week, I'm doing my best to do all scheduled workouts, including a full set of 10 Yasso 800s. So far, my best has been 8. But I've never given myself the full recovery interval (an equal amount of time walking/jogging to the time spent running), so I'm going to hope that with that modification, I can do all 10. Wish me luck.

[In other news, work is crazy busy, and E's business is even more crazy with fundraising and product madness. We're very happy to be home so we can attack the crazy from our comfort zone. Yes, we've got more nights and weekends booked with work-related stuff than we'd like, but at least we're home.]