JRags - Week 8 - Learning how to roll again/Coogan's training

Sunday...

Monday:
AM - to work. a little quicker, but felt pretty good after long run.
PM - barefoot on the baseball field for 4 of 6. felt really good today. a little stiff (esp outer ankles) at first, but warmed up well and felt really strong and smooth. speedstars arrived.

Tuesday:
PM - pretty decent first uptempo with nick jerzy and corey. reverse belmont-ish. felt really good, more splits and everything to come.
http://connect.garmin.com/player/8215290
7:34 7:08 6:44 6:31 6:04 5:45 6:49 6:41 6:51 7:01
middle 2.45 miles (14:30) were 5:53 pace

Wednesday:
AM - home to work very easy. shins a little beat up. ran into the lovely dan darcy.
PM - got lost along the muddy river/jamaica pond from work/fenway. meant to do ~6 at a moderate pace, but ended up hammering the last 4 or 5 miles of the 8+

Thursday:
AM - home to work. beat up at first, but felt good after 3. 4 hills strides up beacon. stretch in the lounge.
PM - very good work today.
3+ barefoot on the turf, 2+ along short 05, quick 10 minutes pooling, a lot of drills, stretch, and pedemyrtle. lots of recovery drink.

Friday:
PM - another great uptempo. felt good. ran with nick and cliff until cliff dropped off at 4 or so. fire house to fake horn pond, back some new parts of the fells. splits are rough, nick will send me his watch soon.
8:15 7:08 7:32 7:19 6:19 5:49 5:49 6:18 8:06 8:20
drills and strides and a quick stretch, some of pedemyrtle. recovery drink.
middle 2.59 at 5:48 pace, 4.01 miles at 6:00 pace.
http://connect.garmin.com/player/8523911

Saturday:
AM - harvard really easy with nick and ana. felt pretty good after yesterday. 4 hill strides up electric. thats a really nice hill for strides. nothing hurt today either.
PM - to the baseball field, then barefoot around with jerzy and brunk. felt pretty good. very hungry by the end, so skipped strides. did some this morning though. it will be an adjustment doing so many strides every day.

Sunday:
AM - ive had the streak going for a few weeks now, so all things considered, i'd give today a "great long run today." revere beach with nick and brunk. terrible route.
7:30 7:10 7:07 6:46 6:41 6:30 6:34 6:31 6:36 6:40 6:50 6:48 6:38 6:36 6:48 7:22
upper left ankle (post tib) hurt all the way through, as did shins from time to time. decently hydrated and fueled the whole way. hot as fuck though.


82 miles on the week. Very good week I think. Hit up-tempo pace 3 times between Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. Did pedemyrtle a few times, once with Jerzy. Felt very much less injured and banged up than I did in the last 2 weeks, part of that being from the barefoot running. I'd like to keep this up maybe in morning runs during the year since I wont have to run to anywhere like I do now.
I can already feel myself improving at the uptempos after two. The first felt a little foreign running that fast just out on a run, but the second one felt more relaxed and was on much harder roads (up to the west of the fells).
I'm sure we all have reactions to the summer training we got so I'll give mine. Overall, I like it. Yeah, it's fairly generic and broad compared to last year's, but there were two things I found interesting.

First, the tempo runs in August. I have very similar ideas to Coach Coogan's when it comes to the tempo run progressions, but maybe at higher intensities. His "training runs" are analogous to my uptempos and his tempos in August correlate to the tempo runs I have in mind as well. I've always thought we should take down the intensities from our old tempo runs, but maybe not quite as much as Coach Coogan recommended. If I'm a 26:00 8k runner (which is still 59 seconds faster than my PR...) my tempo runs should be 5:57-6:12 pace according to the 45-60 second rule. The paces I had in mind were a little faster, maybe 5:40 or so, but as he said, these workouts are still a base building exercise. The real work is yet to come, and I want to be ready for it.

Second is the surprising large emphasis on strides during summer. I think this is a great idea for every one of us. No one will ever get slower by doing more strides, and I think it's unreasonable to thing that building up to 8-10 strides will significantly fatigue you for the next day's run. As Brunk has explicitly said, "nothing will come instead of mileage." For a 10k runner, I agree, but no one should feel as if these strides are going to wear you down so much that you need to take a short recovery day the next day because of them. Strides don't have to be all out tests of top speed, most of them should be just enough to stay in touch with mile/3000m speed. True, I am looking at these strides from a miler's perspective, but I'm fairly certain there is no track event that CAN'T come down to a fast finish. You guys saw the 10k at NESCACs and DIII NE's. Sure, 10 strides can be time consuming, but so is everything we do in running.

One last plug. Here's another way I decide whether to go the extra mile in running or not:

Would you prefer that the Williams guys do it instead?