When it hits.

I’d like to start by saying, That overall, this has been a pretty decent training cycle. I’ve hit most of my runs, I’ve yet to feel any significant ITB pain (knock on wood) and overall I’ve been feeling good. (I haven’t blogged as consistently as possible – but that has less to do with my desire to talk about and reflect on my training than it does with this damn masters thesis I’ve been writing.)

As with any training cycle, as you start to hit those higher mileage weeks, you definitely begin to notice. And for me, that happened last week,

It was a cutback week anyway but I added in an extra day of xtraining, instead of taking it easier like I should. I also made my weightlifting day, uh, pretty hard. And put it off a day, making it that much closer to my weekend running. poor choices.

I only had 15k on the schedule for a long run. we have a good 5k route around the state college campus here, that makes for safe running. It also is NOT flat, so it helps with some of that hill training I’ve been very obviously neglecting this cycle. It was kinda cold, but not terrible on Sunday, but man, that wind was a beast. I started out, ok, then… well then it was like I wasn’t even moving forward.

I thought I was running a decent and comfortable 10:40 pace, based on my effort. When I snuck a peek at my Garmin, it turned out I was running closer to a 12:00 mile. WHAT?!? I can’t remember the last time I worked SO hard to run SO slow. It was miserable. I really really felt like I was running much faster than that.

It was a huge disappointment. Between the general struggle to connect my mind and my legs, continue moving forward, and the huffing and puffing, I called it after the second loop and stopped for the day at 10k.

I gave up.

It sucks. I was super bummed and annoyed with myself. Cutting a run short because you’re seeing stars is one thing. But this felt different. I felt like a quitter. and maybe I was.

You read a lot of blogs entries from runners about powering through. And that’s what you do in training – most of the time. But every runner, even those 3:20 marathoners have bad days/weeks. Everyone has runs that just get the best of them once in a while.

I resolved to brush of that run, and make this week the best I could in terms of training. And so far I have – going into the weekend mileage I’m feeling much more confident than last week. I’ve been trying to frame what happened last week as a mid-cycle taper, which should just help to make my next two long runs stronger, right?

Don’t believe the hype folks, even the super happy, super peppy, super dedicated runners have bad days. Not blogging about running that’s not going well, doesn’t help anybody. Least of all, the blogger.