Sunshine, You Are My Sunshine

Looks like spring might actually be here!  70s all week (waking up to 50s, perfect running weather), the first yard-mowing weekend of the year coming up, and just 4 short weeks until my first 5k of 2011!  Forgive me for talking about the weather, but for runners, I feel like weather is actually an acceptable topic during a conversation.

I had a murderous 4 mile tempo run this morning.  I wanted to go 7:00, the effort was there, but the speed just wasn't.  It ended up around 7:15, which is slightly under what I did two weeks ago over 3 miles, so I'm not completely dissatisfied with it.  I just feel like I should have made better progress, even with inspection work limiting me last week.





I'm pretty much back on schedule now, but my running future is looking shaky.  This weekend will be a two day running, mowing, and cleaning extravaganza at my house.  My wife has to work the weekend, and with me busy last week and her sick this week, there's a lot to catch up on.

I've got next week here in the office, then I start inspection again the week after that - probably.  We're shuffling the schedule around again for it, so it isn't certain.  What is looking certain is that my performance will suffer.  I'm not hitting the benchmarks in training that I wanted to hit by now, and a hectic schedule will only make that worse.


But as always, I've got a plan!  I'm a planner.  I can be spontaneous, and unpredictable - when I plan to be.

The first step is to adjust my expectations.  I need to take a realistic look at where I'm at, and what I think I can do in the first race, and train accordingly.  Step two is to adjust my workouts to the new situation - long hours in the field, sleeping at a hotel, and running unfamiliar (and unmeasured) routes.  For my hard workouts I plan to do a Kenyan workout that the categorize as a fartlek (I'd almost call it intervals).  Warm up, then go race pace for 60s, jog for 60s.  Repeat.  I plan to do 15 of them on my first workout and see how that goes.  For everything else, again, I plan to borrow from the Kenyans.  I'll run by feel, and base things on time instead of distance.

And since I'll have my laptop with me to do inspection reports, I'll be able to keep you all abreast (giggles) of the situation and how things are working out.