Let's see what to discuss this week...UMiami is in first place in their division (sorry had to throw that in there). Had some nice workouts this week, and pushed myself a little to hard too. Also, I signed up for the City of Angels Half-Marathon on December 7th, so I am very excited about that. That leaves about two more training weeks and then a slight taper week. With how well my workouts have been the last two weeks or so I am hoping to have a good result. I think I have a shot at breaking 1:30, but that is only if everything goes very well during the race.
I read something this week about increasing stride length, and it said to increase length you want to extend your leg as far behind yourself as you can. I had always thought this to mean that you should bring your feet up closer to you butt, however now I think this means before you pick your feet up off the ground, i.e. to get as much push off as you can. Applying this will take some getting used to because to get a stronger push off I think I need to contact the ground more midfoot than forefoot. Anyway's I had one run this week where I used this method to good effect. I was able to maintain a decent pace, and kept my heart rate low. The other days my calves were a little too worn out to run with proper form.
I am still experimenting with pre-long run meals. This week I tried having a bowl of granola with soy milk and a banana. I like the granola because it is very dense with calories. In fact the night before I measured out three servings because it looked so small and I thought I would get hungry, but two servings was plenty. It is a little difficult to judge if this meal is good enough for performance to be my new pre-long run meal because there were some other factors during Sunday's run that effected my performance. In particular, the air quality was poor and we ran a wood-chip trail today. However, I think it might be my new favorite, and I will try it again next week.
Training this week was very good. I ran too hard on Wednesday (was racing a friend), which made Friday's tempo run a little more challenging but I still had a very nice workout.
Last weeks training:
Tuesday - 6.06 Mile Easy/Fartlek Run - 47:15 min, 7:45 pace
Wednesday - 5.31 Mile Easy Run - 40:39 min, 7:39 pace
Thursday - 4.91 Mile Easy Run - 39:34 min, 8:03 pace
Friday - 7.00 Mile Tempo Run - 50:27 min, 7:12 pace - Warm up, 5 Miles at 6:55 pace, cool down
Sunday - 9.88 Mile Long Run - 1:18:52 min, 7:58 pace
