You’ll notice some of my runs got swapped around this week. My grandmother sadly passed away early Wednesday morning after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, so I was in Clarksville for most of the week. I decided to do my longer runs on Thursday and Friday, since the funeral was on Saturday, and I wanted to get out during the weekdays to get my mind off of everything.

Tuesday

I went to the gym Tuesday night. I had left my Garmin at Jonathan’s accidentally, so I decided to do a ladder workout.

“What is a ladder workout?” you ask. Ladder workouts are comprised of intervals that vary in length, either increasing or decreasing in incremental steps. They are usually used for speed training and can be done on a treadmill, a track, or anywhere. I was just using them to break up treadmill monotony so I just ranged from easy to tempo pace.

Here is how my ladder workout worked: I started at 4.8, which I ran at for 6 minutes. Then I took a 1 minute recovery at 3.5. Then I ran at 5.0 for 5 minutes. Then recovered. 5.2 for 4 minutes…you get the picture. I went up to 5.8 for 1 minute, then went back down the ladder (stopping at the end of the 5.2 interval since I reached my 3 miles at that point).

(A track ladder workout, on the other hand, might look something like: run at half marathon pace for 1600 meters, recover, then run at 10k pace for 800 meters, recover, then run at 5k pace for 400 meters.)

I watched “Dumbo” on Netflix while I did this. I had no issues. No aches. No side stitches. It was actually kind of fun. I might start doing them more.

No strides this week since I’m being ginger with my training at the moment.

Thursday

Thursday’s run was supposed to be my usual 5 mile easy run, but the route I like to run around where my parents live is closer to 6.5 miles, so that is what I did. I still didn’t have my Garmin, so I set up Strava to record my run and report my progress every half mile. So I took walk breaks at the start of each half mile that lasted usually a minute or less. I didn’t have any issues other than a nasty blood blister that I developed. I’d post a picture, but I don’t want to gross anyone out.

Friday

Since I had done 6.5 instead of 5 on Thursday, I subtracted 1.5 miles from my long run, making it 9.5 miles instead of 11. My legs were very tired going into the run, which was the point, and they were extremely exhausted after I was done. But I did it!

Sunday

Time for that 30 minute tempo run that didn’t go well last week. I was also going for it outside, which meant I didn’t have the treadmill to ensure I was keeping pace. We all know that I suck at pacing.

I started off with an easy mile to warmup, which I did in 12:45. Just where I wanted. I took a brief walk break right at the end of the interval before the start of my 30 minutes. Then it was time: half an hour at tempo pace, which is, for me, 10:45-11:15 min/mi. I had set up Runkeeper to give me audible feedback on my pace every three minutes, so I was excited when after the first three minutes, it said I was at 11:09 min/mi. Perfect. It was a comfortably hard pace, just like a tempo run is supposed to be. And I maintained it (well, actually got a little faster) for the entire 30 minutes. I ended up going a little faster than my tempo pace towards the end, which I could tell I was doing, but I felt good. So maybe I finally learned how to pace?