Week One Progress Report

Today ends the first week of the schedule produced by the collective conscious of the Connecticut Running Camp. The week started with the revelation that I'm pretty out of shape. My deplorable time trial on Monday was tempered a bit by the fact that I had run six races in a little over a week, however.  With this in mind, I figured recovery would be just as important as training and finding the right balance would be tricky. My five mile sub tempo on Wednesday did not lead to much confidence in this regard. While I thought 6:30 pace would feel disappointingly easy, I actually had to kick hard to average under that pace. The combination lack of fitness and fatigue from all the races was coming back to haunt me. Thursday helped things turn around a bit with a fairly comfortable and actually pretty quick four loops (10.4 miles) around Lake Padden. Friday was another good run with some strides and an overall solid pace so it seemed like I had finally started to thread the effort/recovery needle. Saturday was supposed to be a traditional EMH workout but Tesseract was doing a Padden workout so I decided to compromise with EMH 400s around Padden for 3.35 miles. The workout went well with the only setback being a little less speed on the hard portions than I had hoped for. Overall, however, it was a positive indicator. I was scheduled for an easy 13 Sunday which turned out to be far too easy and not quite 13 due to some planning errors but in keeping with the goal from the beginning of the week, I figured erring on the side of a little extra recovery would be fine. Overall I got 67 in for the week and had three quality workouts and two other legitimate medium days. I want to be back into the 16s in  four weeks and preferably under 16:40 so we'll see how that goes. I look forward to week two of my schedule. It's good to have some focus again!