How do people do it?

on Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 11:27 PM

So this past week marked the first week that I had to travel downtown to work. I live out in the boonies and everywhere I"ve worked has been within a 15 minute drive from home. I used to wake up at 7:30 on non-training days. Now i have to be out of the house by then to be able to make it to work before 9am. In the past, I think the earliest I had gotten up on a work day was 5am for a 15 mile run and I only did that once. I woke up at 4:45 on Thursday to get a 10 miler in before leaving. I've just found myself exhausted when I get back home. How do people do this day in and day out? So week went like follows.

Tuesday: 5 miles including 6 strides in the evening

Thursday: 10 miles including 4x1200m at 5k pace. This run started and ended in complete darkness. I ended up going to the track to try and do these. Normally, i would be able to maintain a good 6:20 min/mile pace since i can get pacing feedback every 200m and can constantly adjust. With complete darkness and my watch battery close to dying so i can't be constantly pushing the light button (i'm hoping it'll last till the Toronto marathon expo where they usually have a polar authorized jeweler to change the battery and do leak testing), i tried to run this by feel and wasn't very successful. I did the repeats with the following average paces: 6:45, 6:39, 6:34, 6:27. I ended up using the light after each repeat cause I could never get the pace right. I'm thinking I should bring a head lamp to allow me to see my watch.

Friday: 10.2 miles at 8:09 min/miles in the evening after work. Super tired afterwards.

Saturday:5.4 miles recovery at 9:19min/mile pace in the morning. Was very dehydrated afterwards. tried to drink a lot to prepare for long run on Sunday

Sunday: This was the last super long run planned for this training cycle. Did 21.4 miles and average 8:09 min/mile pace. Started out kinda slow and then by the middle I was clicking along at close to 8min/miles and then finished up with about 2 miles at slightly faster than marathon pace. It was relatively cool. I drank a bit too much the day before and during this run cause I had to stop to use a restroom on three different occasions.  Had some HR spiking problems which was right after my final restroom pitstop.  Ran with it to the next water fountain where I ate a gel and let it come back down.  Ran the waterfront route.  A little less busy.  I wonder how many of the people running are training for one of the Toronto races in two weeks?

Okay, I should probably be in bed now since it's almost 11:30pm and the work week starts tomorrow.  Good night.

1 comments:

EndorphinBuzz said...

I also have a fairly long commute (25km) and I've used it to train instead of sitting in the bus: on my bike for a tri or on foot for my weekly long runs.

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