Monday: rest day
Tuesday: 3.0 miles (11:00 average pace)
Wednesday: 4.3 miles (10:44 average pace)
Thursday: rest day
Friday: rest day
Saturday: 8.0 miles (11:23 average pace)
Sunday: 6.6 miles (11:30 average pace)

My first 20+ mile week in ten months, wow!

East Nasty’s half marathon speed workouts started this week. They are on Thursdays, as usual, but I couldn’t make the first one because of a Preds game. It was on the schedule as “2x (3 min / 2 min / 1 min)”. I wasn’t sure what this meant, so I made something up and did that for my Tuesday treadmill run. I warmed up for a mile and then did two repeats of 3 minutes at 6.1, 2 minutes at 6.3, and 1 minute at 6.5. Then I finished out the third mile with an easy cool down.

(I think the workout actually has something to do with hills, but as you can see from my 1,224 ft total elevation gain this week, I had more than enough hills on my other runs.)

On Wednesday, I went out to the usual East Nasty run. Jonathan was supposed to join me, but he got caught up at work, so I ran with the same people I had the week before. It was a good run! However, I noticed my left leg tightening up in the IT band/quad area when stopping for cars on the last mile or so. I met up with Jonathan for pizza at Five Points afterwards and didn’t think anything else of it.

We slept in a bit on Saturday and went out to the greenway just before lunch. The plan was to run the “flatter” section of the greenway (none of it is actually flat), but once we got a quarter mile down, we saw it was flooded. Thus, we ended up running the hillier section. We got eight miles in, but it was a little tough, and I had to stop and walk a few times. My knees were absolutely killing me nearly the whole run! And I could still sort of feel the tightness in my left leg as well, so I tried rolling that out when we returned home.

Jonathan is playing indoor soccer on Sundays this season and he plays out near Percy Warner park. I wanted to go out there and run the 5.8 mile loop (or some of it, depending on how tired my legs felt). I decided I would do 4:1 intervals to assist in recovery, since I had just done eight miles the day before. I followed all the arrows next to the signs that said “Running Route” and…5.8 miles later, I still wasn’t back where I started. I kept going, thinking it had to be soon, but after another mile, I conceded that I had no idea where I was and started looking up maps.

I walked for probably another two miles before running into Jonathan looking for me. Thank goodness for great boyfriends who won’t leave you lost in the park! I interestingly got negative splits on this run, despite the crazy elevation profile, probably because I was wanting more and more for it to be over with by the end.

When I got back and finally examined what went wrong, I realized I had been following the arrows for the 11.2 route. Oops!

As the night progressed, my left IT band slowly got tighter and tighter to the point where I had to take ibuprofen just to fall asleep because it was so annoyingly painful. I’m going to take two days rest and make sure I’m doing all my clamshells this week!