Apr 22, 2023 5 min read

10 - TWR 4 - Training Week Recap (4/10-16)

9 days out from Eugene Marathon! This Training Week Recap is coming out later than usual. I usually write these the Monday following a training week to reflect on the previous week and also plan for the upcoming week of training. I’m writing this one on the following Friday afternoon. It’s been a wacky week. Let’s get started.

Total Run Mileage: 46.17mi / 74.30km (of 58 miles planned..)

Format: (Planned / Actual); “” denotes that the workout what completed as planned

Monday: Full Recovery Day / “”, more bloggy cafe time
Tuesday: 10 mi Fartlek Workout / “” + ham+calf strength + 10 min yoga
Wednesday: Easy 4 mi / “” + 15 min yoga
Thursday: 14 mi Midweek Long Run / impromptu off day
Friday: Easy 4 mi + Strength Maintenance / 14 mi Long Run
Saturday: 18 mi Long Run Interval Workout / impromptu off day, travel day
Sunday: Easy 8 mi / 18 mi Long Run Interval Workout + 1 mi walk

Reflecting on the past week of training is hard.. It was a mishmash of difficult/painful experiences that were not directly related to my running but ended up affecting my training. By the numbers, I ran 46 of my planned 58 miles with 2 runs missed. I took three days “off” from running, but two of those days didn’t feel restful at all.

Now, I try really hard to get my non-running life and my running to sync up and agree with each other. I’ll turn morning runs to night runs to make early work meetings. I’ll shuffle my training days around to make space for social plans. I’ll run doubles (two runs in a day) to make up for a missed run. Completely missing a run is the last card I’ll play. I ended up playing two of those cards due to how things related to my work, romantic relationship, and travel coincided. There’s interplay between these elements, but I think it’s best to talk about them separately.

Work - (due to the nature of my work as a front-line manager in the defense industry, I don’t want to get too detailed here so I’ll keep this high level.) From the start of the week, I had a big project to work with a few of my team members. It was an “everything’s on fire” type of situation, and my team was the firefighters. We had other stakeholders/customers in another time zone that needed to know our progress real-time, so that meant a lot of tag-ups and early morning meetings. That’s fine, I can just run in the evenings! All good, I’ve handled ramped up work stress alongside my running before, and I knew (or at least hoped) that this situation was temporary. Things really heated up Thursday. That was our commit date to get out a work product, and come the Thursday morning review, it was clear the work product needed a lot more work put into it before we could deliver. We started at 5am, had an internal review, made revisions, had an external review, made more corrections, delivered, aaand it was 5pm. Fire was suppressed, but I was COOKED. So there was absolutely no way I was gonna force the planned 14 miler that day. Best I could do is rest and get the miles in tomorrow.
Relationship - (I’m gonna try to tread cautiously here. Though I normally aim to be very transparent about what’s going on in my life, I want to be respectful toward my and my SO’s relationship, so no extraneous details here.) BAM, it’s tomorrow, and there’s trouble in paradise. Hehe jk, it’s not that serious. Gosh it’s hard to talk about relationship difficulties lightheartedly. I’m 7 months in a relationship with my SO, and we’re continuing to learn and grow a lot together. I think naturally that means recognizing differences in communication and expectations. And with that comes unexpected, serious, urgent conversations. We had a few of those this week. We most often come out of those conversations better and stronger as a couple, but there is a cost. I want to be clear, the cost is well worth it. I would do it again and again. But I do want to recognize the time and emotional energy that these types of convos can require. And those expenditures can result in less sleep and other sorts of friction in moving on and getting on with other things.
Travel - (and concerts!) John Mayer in LA on Friday and then FKJ in Las Vegas on Sunday. We planned to drive out to Vegas on Saturday morning, but following the previously mentioned happenings of the week, we ended up getting into Vegas Saturday evening. The drive took a toll on me, and afterward I made the call to not force my run in so that I could do my Sunday 18 miler “fresh”, which I did! So mission accomplished.

Writing all that out was cathartic. I think I still had some lingering ill-feeling about last week, and writing helped process that. WOO that’s what we’re (I’m) here for :D

Ok so the things I want to just underscore, highlight, bold, italicize are that:

Things happen! All of these things are kinda just normal life things. I think the thing that hit me is just the increased magnitude of each and that they coincided.
Capacity for stress is finite. I 100% believe this. And “stress” is a broad umbrella. There’s work stress, emotional stress, travel stress, stress from running, stress from environment. Everything! So this all was a good exercise and reminder in being real with what I can handle and being flexible/dynamic to make changes along the way.

One more big topic, that I think I should later devote a fuller post to:

GUILT. I’ve felt this a lot in my running. I still feel some from last week. When you have numbers to hit, both paces and mileage, it’s easy to feel fault from not hitting them. When I look at my training calendar, I tend to think something along the lines of “doing all of these workouts as prescribed will give me the best result on race day..And so, anything less must mean a less-than-best result on race day.” NO. False!

I’ve come to learn (and am still working to absorb) that there’s a lot more to training than just the plan. There’s strength training, stretching, yoga, PT, sleep, rest, diet, LIFE. I can be more forgiving with myself on this front and have faith that this is a blip and that I’ll bring myself back to long term consistency with my overall training.

As a result of all of the happenings in the past week, I..really haven’t given much thought to my marathon, which is NINE DAYS. AHHHHH. I’m not actually freaking out, which is surprising? I do want to make sure this isn’t just numbness or distractedness speaking, and I also want to refresh on those bullets from last week’s TWR and add one point:

Mindset training - overall just getting my mind ready to race. This might involve meditation, visualization exercises of different race scenarios, watching the anime Run with the Wind.
Race day warm-up routine - dynamic stretches, short sprints, drills?
Race day routine - (also the night-before routine). Laying out my race kit, bedtime, morning stretches and meditation, journaling, etc.
Carb loading - a little self explanatory. I wanna make sure my energy stores are topped off! I did this kinda dirty for 2022 CIM with lots of sugary things, so I’ll see how I can eat more cleanly.
Anticipating the post-race blues - last year I experienced this after CIM. It felt like butt, so I want to prepare for and hopefully mitigate that.

These will be my focuses for the days leading up to the marathon!

4/17-23 Planned

Monday: Full Recovery Day
Tuesday: 6 mi Easy Run + Strength Maintenance
Wednesday: 10 mi Interval Workout
Thursday: 12 mi Midweek Long Run
Friday: Easy 4 mi + Strength Maintenance
Saturday: Recovery Day
Sunday: 13 mi Interval Workout