Weekly Training Update

I managed to survive the scorching heat this week and had a pretty good post-race training week with 41 miles in 6 workouts (one day off for a much needed sports massage). After a few short and easy days to allow myself to recover from the Shot in the Dark race I had a really good 9 mile fartlek run on Wednesday a hilly segment of the Rocky River Reservation metro park. After warming up 20 minutes, I did a session of 6-5-4-3-2-1 where you run 6 minutes hard, 3 easy; 5 minutes hard, 2:30 easy etc. working your way down till you barely have any recovery time at the end. In addition to decreased recovery, the aim for this workout is to also run each surge faster than the one before, so if you do it right it's a real ball buster. Typically I start the 6:00 surge at about the same effort I might race a 10-miler and by the end of the workout, I'm running the 2:00 and 1:00 surges a tad faster than 5K effort. On Saturday I ran 95 minutes (12 miles give or take) on the trails in Mastick Woods, which were quite muddy from recent storms. Pretty fun to get off road and navigate on the trails. My next race will be a 5K cross country event at Mastick on August 10, so for the next two weeks I'll be doing a hilly fartlek session mid-week and a trail run on the weekend.