The grabbing hands grab all they can

With the summer racing series over, I've switched to my own speed workouts. This was an interesting week for that. Neither work out was awesome. To start, I did the first one wrong. Planned was 5x3 minutes @10k pace. I did 5x5 mins. Ooops. I had a feeling this wasn't right sometime into my 2nd one. I was like, oh well, I just do this. It ended up being 10 minutes of faster running than planned and it was a little slower than planned.
Next up was a tempo run. 4 miles. Now, hmmm, I started out with a few strikes:1. lady time. 2. Sore ass from doing some squats. Seriously, not a lot and with no weight, I was like WTF. Again, the milage was done, but the speed was off. It's frustrating. I'm not concerned really since I know from the Thurs. night races I can hit the paces. It was just 2 off workouts in a row.
All my other runs have been totally fine.
Today's speed session was 4x800. I haven't run on a track in ages. Generally when I have a workout like this, I just do them where every I happen to be running. Since I'm still figuring out where to run by my house that's not too hilly, I decided to take this one to the track. Plus Loren is off today so we did it together.
This workout made up for the 2 boob moves from last week. My intervals went like this: 3:34, 3:28, 3:29, 3:24. I felt really good. We followed it up with some strides and drills in the field barefoot.

This coming weekend, Loren and I are headed to AZ to hit the hight point. I need to shuffle some workouts around. The hike will be 9 miles and gain 3500' up to 12,633'. I think I will keep my speed workouts, I need to focus on that more than distance, and scrap the 13 miler my long run for the week. With the hike, it will be a similar effort.

I also signed up for a 4 mile trail race the following weekend, some East coast friends will be out for a tougher 10 mile race. I'm taking the easier route with the 4. Loren's going for the 10. This should be interesting....

If anything could ever be this good again

I'll start with shoes. As I said in my last post I had a shoe problem. The lovely folks at Jackrabbit let me exchange my shoes. So now, I have a new (and pinkish...hhmmm....) pair of Asics 2150s. I've been wearing this line of Asics for years and years, always an 8.5. This time the 8.5 felt big, so I went down a size. I also went down to a narrow. The felt so good when I tried them on and so far, they feel really good to run in.

As for running this week, I did 5ish on Monday, when I discovered the shoe issue. Tues, with new shoes, I ran 3 easy with Bea. I've also had a bit of a head cold that I'm trying to blow out with little success. Running makes me feel better for a little while anyway. Today, I wanted to try adding some speed. I think it's time if for nothing else to see how much fitness I've lost over the last few months. Ok, that's a negative spin, let's put it this way: to see where I am fitness-wise right now.
I met Ishii in the park and was decided what to do, tempo, hills...tempoish hills is what we decided on. 2 clockwise loops of the Harlem Hills. It's a nice 1.4 mile loop that has a bit of everything, 2 nice uphills, a long downhill, and a fairly flat straightaway. I figured maybe I'd be able to do 8-8:10 pace with the shape I'm in.
lap 1: 10:51 which is about 7:50 pace. I was surprised by that. 2 minute rest and away we go.
Lp 2. 10:51. I was actually really surprised that we were that fast and that consistent. I certainly felt like I was working but not dying and could have gone again (thankfully wasn't going to). 6 miles for the day. So, even with that time recovering, better shape than I expected! This makes me feel a little better about Boston which I feel way behind in training for.
This weekend is the Manhattan Half marathon. When I started running again, I made this a goal in terms of long run distance, so I'll be doing that on Sunday.
I'm still being cautious, but things are going pretty well on the recovery.