Running into the New Year

Week 7 is officially done. And it's a good thing too, because it was a rough one! This week ended at a total volume of 54 miles with 25 miles of that done at between 5:20 and 6:40 pace. Until now I hadn't experienced the 'Accumulated Fatigue' that the Hanson's program indicated is one of the key principles of their training, but this week it hit me.
After Monday's tough track workout I had my day off on Tuesday followed by my tempo on Wednesday night. Once again it was a 7-mile tempo plus warmup and warm-down. I did it on the treadmill again this week due to the continued presence of snow & ice on the trails. It went like this:

7-mile tempo @ 6:06 mile pace

6:05, 6:05, 6:05, 6:05, 6:06, 6:04, 6:06

Thursday & Friday were easy runs (8mi & 6.5mi respectively), but those were leading into what I knew was going to be a ridiculous long run on Saturday morning: 

Long Run: 14-miles @ 6:41 pace

avg'd 6:45/mi pace

Although the effort was only to be at 6:41-pace, a pretty attainable pace, I thought, it was the load of the entire week that got to me and in the final four miles my pace fell from around 6:40's to anywhere between 6:50-7:00. It was a TOUGH run. Today, I followed it up with an easy 6-miles on the treadmill at about 7:33 pace.

I'm pretty happy with the training has been going overall so far but am nervous about the remaining 10-weeks of the program. Some of them look absolutely brutal with hard strength workouts on Mondays, even longer tempo runs on Wednesdays and long runs, as long as 16-miles at 6:41 pace, to end the weeks. On the upside though I did find out this week that although I didn't have a qualifying full-marathon time within the timeframe that the race directors were looking for (because I haven't run one since March of '11), they went ahead and seeded me in the first Corral for race day anyway!

10 weeks to go... Happy Training everyone!