It Ain't Always Easy

Quite outdated photo from 2009 by Lada,
it reminds me of the importance
of looking ahead in the right direction.

Idea of writing this post came in last Monday during my 15 km run. Since "It Ain't Always Easy", I did not find time to finish it until now. I was too busy working, running, taking photos and having fun on snow with two cutest little creatures in the world. And then Janae posted about our Fear of Failure and Perfectionism. Sometimes I think Janae can read my mind. What is this about? About the reminder to myself that through running I am constantly challenging myself which helps me in becoming better person.

It was my mid-distance, average speed run - not the fastest, not the long slow run. 9.32 miles (15 km) at 8:59 min/mile (5:35 min/km) pace. It is kind of slow even, but honestly, it was a tough run. Over the winter months, we concentrated on building a solid base at slow paces in order to let my body recover after the NYC marathon and all the training and troubles that preceded it. And I kind of got used to the training that ain't that difficult. The paces felt more or less easy, of course the weekly sessions with The Coach were tough, so were the hills, but that is given period of time, given set of repetitions. I can cope with that. Though honestly, the sessions with The Coach at 6:30 am in the darkest winter months - not much motivation and enthusiasm from my part. I am over that trouble, The Coach is hard on me, but I tend to feel better during the training with him.

Back to the last week's run. It was almost 90 minutes - one and half hours. Quite a long time of not feeling at ease, comfortable like I am having things under control. On the other hand, there is the feeling that comes when you finish such a workout. Or even before that, when you are still running, but you already know that you will finish the dreadful workout at given pace with all the required distance under your belt. Yay! The more I am thinking about it, the more I think that such workouts when you are not absolutely at ease feeling great are more valuable than anything. Honestly, I do not want to run my races at an easy pace, I do care if my result is the best I can do. I am still slow enough to set new and new PRs and I am not afraid to admit that :) Yes, I am a competitive crazy hot pink runner!

So how did the week turn out? It turned out in my highest weekly mileage ever, which is 58.08 miles (93.47 mi). You can see the Garmin weekly summary below (click on the picture to see the detail):

Being not always easy continued when I got the new training plan on Monday from The Coach. Monday should have been a day off after finishing the 7 training units in 8 days with only one session with The Coach in between (= no day off), but I played a little squash finally. OK, so I got the new plan with new speed workout - in the last one there were 8x 600 m for the speed work, now I got 10x 800 m at crazy fast pace. I texted The Coach asking if he was sure about the pace for the speed workout, he promptly replied that yes, he wants to spice things up and add intensity. I got a text later, correcting the time for 800 m, the correct time is 3:35-3:45 per 800 m = 7:30-7:14 min/mile pace (4:40 min/km - 4:30 min/km). I was little afraid, but fortunately I read great Janae's post and running psychology article at Behej.com (sorry in Czech only) and both helped me to get mentally ready for the workout. Here are the splits from Garmin and bellow the pace and hart rate graphs:

We discussed my training schedule for this week with The Coach since there is another 10 km race of the "University league" - VŠ liga this Saturday. Which meant for me doing the speed workout right next day after the session with The Coach (included 2x 800 m as a test). I was allowed to go down to 8x 800 m if I felt too tired. I had the hesitation for a moment to do it that way, but finally managed to kick my own butt and finish the last two reps as the fastest ones. (The first two ones do not count, since I they were little bit shorter.) I am running the 10 km from a full training, but still we added day off yesterday, I went to sauna and got a massage. Physiotherapy today morning and a pre-race tuning run planned for today evening. We will see tomorrow where I got from my last attempt in January.


Short reminder: I made it to the final of the "Best Czech Running Blog" here at Leona's blog. Thank you for voting for me in the first round!!! You can still support me in the finals :) What is more important, I would really appreciate your feedback. Let me know what are you interested in, what are your ups and downs and what would you like to read about?