This morning it was one of those you wake up to an inch or so of pain-in-the-arse white shite, which meant just enough snow moving for three driveways and then getting to walk Bennie a ways in wet slushy crap.

After Bennie’s first walk, I decided to throw together this breakfast and it didn’t last too long, although Bennie did do more than his usual begging for a piece of the sausage pattie. 🙂

Can you tell that I love snow about this time of year. Sometimes I think that I would almost rather deal with a 6-12 inch storm than a PIA 1-2 inches. At least what I didn’t have to move melted for the most part later in the day.

Which meant that while I was scheduled for a Something of Substance (SOS) workout according to the Hansons Half Plan, it didn’t mean that I was chomping at the bit to do it after having over 10,000 steps on the old body by 9:30a. Yeah, I was already tired and really thought about moving the planned tempo workout to Friday.

However with freezing rain in the forecast for tonight, I figured that I might as well just do it today and get it over with. I figured that I would do the minimum: 1.0 mile warm-up, 3 miles at 1/2 marathon race pace and a mile cool-down.

Err that was the plan.

1.0 warm-up @ 6.3 mph – no issues and the legs started to feel pretty good

4.0 tempo @ 7.8 mph – I felt really strong the entire time and focused on keeping my form compact.

.50 cool-down @ 6.1 mph – Everything felt good, so I decided that I would do some strides.

7 x .10 strides @ 9.1 mph and .10 recovery @ 6.1 mph – the fast stuff felt really good and when I got to the 6.5 mile point, I decided to keep doing them to 7.0 miles

Dramatic pause and music cued please.

1 x .10 strides @ 10.1 mph – my old quarter repeat speed something that I haven’t felt comfortable enough to try lately and even though it was only for .10, it felt good to run that fast and be able to do it without pain or feeling like the old body was going to go into shock or something.

Walked .40 to cool-down at constantly slower paces.

I am very happy with how well the workout went this morning, while I have been getting closer to being able to hold some of these paces better than I have in the past – that consistent training thing is helping a lot. I didn’t expect to be successfully doing this kind of volume workout at this point in my training, actually, I didn’t expect to hit these kind of paces at all.

While I usually do better on the treadmill, I am also finding that this year most of my treadmill progress is also translating to running better outside. So I am hoping that keeping pretty close to the Hansons Half Marathon training plan will provide me enough structure to keep making good progress, but at the same time letting me continue to see progress, but allow me to stretch out the legs every once in a while, just not all that often.

Believe me, I know that I need to keep to the guard rails that the Hansons plan is providing me, so that I do not go into full “Harold Mode” and screw everything up by doing too much or thinking that I too can run “that” fast again.

Sometimes I am my own worst enemy and this year I want to work hard to avoid that guy for as long as I can.

The other thing was that I had a nice conversation with an old co-worker from my UMA days, who ran on the treadmill beside me and congratulated me on my workout. I was so focused in on my workout that I didn’t notice her getting on the treadmill or watching me change speeds. I laughed a little when we talked about how it wasn’t bad for an old fart.

We did get caught up on some other stuff and it was nice to talk with her again.

A pretty decent workout.