Hot Hot Hot

Weather has been pretty atrocious for running this past week, but I managed to get in a couple of good 5K specific workouts. On Wednesday I did the famous Australian quarters session of 8 x 400 with brisk 200 jogs for recovery. While the workout sounds easy on paper, it's actually really tough if you push the recoveries. Basically, you want to do the 400s at 5K race pace with the floats as fast as possible without compromising the 400s. I ended up hitting 86/87 across the board on the 400s with all of my 'recoveries' at 7:10-7:20 pace for an overall 3 mile time of 18:48. Not bad for 90 degree weather -- in more ideal conditions I can do this workout closer to 18:00. Today I did a 3 mile threshold run in 18:41, which I was happy with considering it was so humid I felt like I was running in a layer of pea soup. Splits were 6:12, 6:17, 6:17.

As for the book, I've received a couple more fantastic advance reviews, which can be found here:

http://www.elephantstonerecords.com/ben-vendetta/

Really blown away by the reaction so far. Next stage is galley proofs to more writers and hopefully an official release date will be announced soon. I'm feeling like the impatient band who is always bugging his/her label -- sorry Shannon!

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Running Update

It's been awhile but I feel like I've been slowly getting back into a good training and racing groove. I ran 18:00 on the nose on July 6 in very hot and humid conditions, which is probably worth closer to 17:40 or slightly better in an ideal situation.My best time this year has been 17:58 in perfect conditions. My plan is to get in a couple of more 5ks this summer and then take a week off at the end of August when I'm on vacation in New York City, before ramping it up again for the fall. As far as training goes, through trial and error, 4 days a week (about 60 minutes per workout) works best for me. I tried to run a little more than that this Spring and that had me beat up. I'm also finding that doing work faster than 5K beats me up, too, so I'm sticking to tempo and 5K/10K  paced stuff for my harder runs.

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