Tahoe Triple Training - Less than 100 days to go.
I have today off both running and work, so it seems like a good time to check in on my training. Before I go clean the rest of my house, which is evidently what I end up doing on a recovery weekend when I should be resting. House needs it, though.
So we're ~2 months into our training with 3 months to go. And we're firmly into Summer here on the surface of the sun. Every summer Matt swears he's not going to train through the middle of Texas summer, and every summer we end up doing it anyway. Surely it's not as bad as we remember, right?
Wrong. And I swear, as I probably swear every year, that this summer is worse than ones in the past. This time because of the damn HUMIDITY. Sure it's 80 degrees every morning when we run, but it's also 90+% humidity every morning, too. And as this Runner's World article points out, it's not the heat or the humidity, but the combo of the two, aka Dew Point. Most mornings our dew point is between 73 and 75, which puts us somewhere between "Expect pace to suffer greatly" and "Skip it or dramatically alter goal". If we skipped it, though, we'd never get a single run in, so instead we just suffer greatly and learn to live with some dramatically altered paces.
Because we're still getting it done! The miles are creeping ever upward, and my weekly mileage two weeks ago was higher than any of my weeks training for CIM (which I completely admit I undertrained for). So far my body is tolerating the increase just fine, aside from having to really fight to stay on top of hydration. I've even been throwing a couple days of core in a week, which usually would have been long gone by now, in a normal run training season.
Last weekend our Friday-Saturday-Sunday (FSS) block was 8-16-7, which was tough. 16 is where things start to feel like marathon training for me, and to surround that with two longerish runs makes it even tougher. This week was a recovery week (7-10-6), but next week we march ever upward with 9-16-8 and then 9-18-8, where that 18 contains Mount Bonnell.
Meanwhile the forecast assures us that the weather will continue to be super shitty through the end of time (or at least October), so I just keep telling myself that the weather in Tahoe will feel amazing after all this, and we'll be so prepared.
I DO have enough vacation time to take a long weekend and fly somewhere just to do my FSS runs. It's incredibly tempting. Especially with that 15-22-10 looming in the future...
2 months down, 3 to go!
Every Friday I do my run as a run to work, and Matt runs halfway with me, then turns around and runs home. These are the things that make it worth slogging through this horrible weather.
So we're ~2 months into our training with 3 months to go. And we're firmly into Summer here on the surface of the sun. Every summer Matt swears he's not going to train through the middle of Texas summer, and every summer we end up doing it anyway. Surely it's not as bad as we remember, right?
Wrong. And I swear, as I probably swear every year, that this summer is worse than ones in the past. This time because of the damn HUMIDITY. Sure it's 80 degrees every morning when we run, but it's also 90+% humidity every morning, too. And as this Runner's World article points out, it's not the heat or the humidity, but the combo of the two, aka Dew Point. Most mornings our dew point is between 73 and 75, which puts us somewhere between "Expect pace to suffer greatly" and "Skip it or dramatically alter goal". If we skipped it, though, we'd never get a single run in, so instead we just suffer greatly and learn to live with some dramatically altered paces.
Because we're still getting it done! The miles are creeping ever upward, and my weekly mileage two weeks ago was higher than any of my weeks training for CIM (which I completely admit I undertrained for). So far my body is tolerating the increase just fine, aside from having to really fight to stay on top of hydration. I've even been throwing a couple days of core in a week, which usually would have been long gone by now, in a normal run training season.
Last weekend our Friday-Saturday-Sunday (FSS) block was 8-16-7, which was tough. 16 is where things start to feel like marathon training for me, and to surround that with two longerish runs makes it even tougher. This week was a recovery week (7-10-6), but next week we march ever upward with 9-16-8 and then 9-18-8, where that 18 contains Mount Bonnell.
Meanwhile the forecast assures us that the weather will continue to be super shitty through the end of time (or at least October), so I just keep telling myself that the weather in Tahoe will feel amazing after all this, and we'll be so prepared.
I DO have enough vacation time to take a long weekend and fly somewhere just to do my FSS runs. It's incredibly tempting. Especially with that 15-22-10 looming in the future...
2 months down, 3 to go!
Every Friday I do my run as a run to work, and Matt runs halfway with me, then turns around and runs home. These are the things that make it worth slogging through this horrible weather.