Equilibrium

....I've always felt that in training one needs to do what works and that when you are getting ready to race don't do anything out of the ordianry, but every once in a while you need to throw something in there to mess things up. I did one of those things this week. On Tues I wanted to hop on the track as Steve and Dickie were doing a session to set them up for their 10kms on Fri at Stanford.

I ended up down at the Kajaks practice and was expecting to do some repeat 1600s. My legs still felt pretty banged up from the previous training, but I was still in for a 'grinder'. But alas the pups were getting ready for a 5km on Sat.

Hmmmmmmmm.....run with them.......do something on my own....do part of it with them......Ahhhhh what the hell I'll hop with these guys, but I'll shake things up.

I figured that since was supposed to be a down week anyways I'd do their shorter session (1600-1200-800 and 400), but I also knew that if I did it this way I would end up being on my own, so I decided to do a variation of one of my favourite sessions and that is alternating hard and medium paced 200s. I haven't done much change of pace work or fartleks over the last while (I think I really need too though as I respond to them very well).

In the end I ended up doing the session and hitting some okay splits when you consider how I did it. I would let the guys get a lead, chase em down, give up another lead, chase em down and so on. My splits were decent (4:40, 3:29, 2:10 and 62) and the session felt easy, but the next day my legs were really beaten up. It's amazing how doing something just a little bit out of the ordinary really impacted me and for such a long time. My legs still hurt (Sat) today and I could feel the fatigue in my tempo session (although that's another story). I am hoping that once I fully recover this session will really help my running. I am still seeing progress, but not at the pace I would like or am used too.

|On a side note big kudoes to Steve....a big literal PR (although I would argue it really wasn't that big as he was capable of running much faster than his old PR before this race).