Today’s Focus

Beat the Heat

 Planned Workout Description: 

Workout:

• · 20:00 Warm-Up at an easy effort
• · 1:00 Very Hard Effort
• · 9:00 Cool Down at an easy effort

Purpose

Taken from the Stryd Intro Plan.

Your warm-up should be run at an easy and comfortable effort, prepping your body for the hard effort to follow.

The goal for today is to make note of the 2:00 power you produced during day 1 of the plan (269) and try and exceed that for your 1:00 very hard effort. Again, be mindful to not push too hard in the opening section of the 1:00 effort. You should focus on the effort that will leave you with the highest power average over the 1:00 section, which means finishing well and pacing at a steady effort will be the most optimal!

After you finish your 1:00 very hard effort, cool down for 9:00 total. This will bring you to 30:00 of total running for the day. Make sure to sync your data and analyze your effort! 

Dependent upon how the Achilles is feeling at the end of the Stryd 9:00 minute cool-down, I will do a set of strides, the number to be determined by how I am feeling.

Warm-up: 

• 20 leg swing routine (front, side, forward and back rotations) 
• 40 air squats
• 100-ups 

Run #1

• Course: Philbrick Laps
• Type: Stryd Intro Plan Day 3
• Distance: 3.17
• Duration: 30:10
• Power: 206
• Running Streak Day #: 3

What I Actually Did Today: 

• What was your power on the 1:00 very hard section? 285
• How much higher was it than the 2:00 section? 16 points

Didn’t beat the heat, and yes, it beat on me.

The Achilles was a bit grumpy this morning when I started, so I was reasonably sure that the extra strides that I had planned would not get done, and I was correct. I didn’t do the strides at the end. 

As I did the 20:00 minute warm-up, I got pretty warm. The temps were in the mid-to-upper ’70s, and by the time I got to run that faster segment, I was running in full sun. Although the Achilles did loosen up a little, enough that I was willing to do the faster segment.

Initially, I was over 300 on Stryd for the 1:00 minute time trial. Unfortunately, I melted into a puddle and, by the end, had slowed into the 270s. It was not what I wanted, but it is a pretty good indicator of how out of shape I am right now. Yes, it is frustrating, but I have to rebuild the engine again. 

Plus, I still can’t do a good toe-off with the Achilles grumpy, which affects how well or fast I can run. I have to be patient and get the Achilles all the way back so that when I toe-off, it is my toe-off. Not this half-hearted stuff I am presently doing.

This run, more than some others showed me how far I have to go to get back in shape I want to be in. Yeah, that far. 😢

Variables that impacted the run: 

Injuries/Niggles: The left Achilles was still quite grumpy this morning. So I wanted to be careful during the run so that I didn’t want to piss it off completely. I ended up just doing the one hard push for a minute and ran easy the rest of the time. The unplanned/planned strides would have been too much due to how my Achilles was feeling.

Weather: Clear sky, 75°F, Feels like 72°F, Humidity 50%, Wind 6mph from W 

Shoes: ASICS EvoRide 2 – No issues with the EvoRide 2s. They felt comfortable and picked up the pace nicely when I did the 1:00 minute hard push segment.

Yeah, running in the 1080 v10s that were too small for me yesterday caused more of the Achilles issues than I had thought. As soon as I finished running in them, I could tell that the Achilles was not at all happy. While the soreness isn’t as severe as before. If I had continued to run regularly in those shoes, the Achilles would have been back to being a BIG problem again. As it is the Achilles is grumpy enough and that is not the direction that I want to go, so I am glad that they are going away. 

Sometimes the shoes are the problem, and when they are, you have to get rid of them, so you don’t keep trying to use them because they look great and feel good underfoot, but suck when it comes to how they work for you and how you run.

Other Stuff

I am having a hard time keeping up my motivation to train hard. It isn’t anything serious and will pass when the contractors are finished working on the house. The truth is that I am attempting to keep a lid on too much, keep Bennie from melting down, and making sure that TheWife is getting her workouts in as well. It will be over soon, and we will get back to our regular schedule. Yeah, I believe that everyone (critters and people) will be happy when that happens. 

Home repairs/remodeling is exhausting, and we are not even the ones doing the work. 🙃