Speed Work

4 Comments June 29, 2015 Nora @ 2 Generations Running

Well, the no-work/sleeping in part of this weekend was fun… The running, not so much.

With my limited time during the week for workouts, I’ve been really determined lately to make the most of my weekends. So, despite feeling really wiped out towards the end of this week (like falling asleep at 9:30 exhausted) and having the beginnings of some congestion and a sore throat, I headed to the track Saturday morning to do some speedwork.

The plan was to get back to doing Yasso 800’s. I wanted to do 6-8 repeats at 7:30 pace.

It didn’t happen.

I warmed up with a half mile jog and then began the workout. I managed to get through 4 repeats, which were all on target with my time goal… but I felt gross. My nose was running (faster than I was!), my legs felt heavy, and my head just wasn’t in the game. My body just did not seem to want to cooperate, so I cooled down with another mile jog at a comfortable (aka pretty dang slow) pace and called it a day. I know most of running is mental, and looking back, I kind of have to wonder if I could have pushed myself to do more sets if I had stopped my negative self-talk.

I know a lot of people actually enjoy going for a run when they’re sick (I’ve heard it can make you actually feel better), but I don’t think I’m one of those people. While I did pick a pretty strenuous workout to test myself with, I don’t think I would have fared much better on a slower run around the neighborhood.

Sunday was rainy and gross all morning, and I gladly took the excuse to stay indoors and do a couple FitnessBlender videos for abs and lower-body.

I’m still not feeling 100% but I’m hoping I’ll rally in time to run a speedy time in the 5k on Tuesday. I’m really hoping to creep up a few places in my age group this week!

I hope you had a great weekend? How do you feel about running when you’re sick? Any tips for beating negative self-talk?

6 Comments June 8, 2015 Nora @ 2 Generations Running

Happy Monday!

I hope you all had a great weekend! We had a lot of rain and generally gross weather last week, but it cleared up just in time for the weekend so my mom and I were both able to squeeze some great runs in!

We kicked off Saturday morning with some speedwork at the track.

I tested out a new camera timer app I downloaded by taking a pic of my snazzy Asics. 🙂

I did the same workout I had done the last time, except I managed to NOT wimp out this time and did 6 repeat 800’s instead of 5. 🙂

Fun fact I just learned about Yasso 800s – if you do 10 sets (so that means 10 800-meter repeats with a 400 meter jog in between each), take the average time in minutes and seconds and translate that into hours and minutes to get an idea of your marathon finishing time! So for example, if you do your repeats at an average of 3 minutes, 30 seconds, your marathon finishing time should roughly be 3 hours, 30 minutes. The runner geek in me finds this pretty cool.

I had heard of Yasso 800’s before, but I never knew this detail about them! Needless to say, I plan to keep doing this workout and gradually increase my sets up to 10. I did ZERO speedwork before my last marathon, so I have no idea how accurate this would be for me (it varies by individual), but I really want to experiment now. I came across this factoid on Sunday while browsing through the newest addition to our running library –

My mom picked this out to help as she begins training for marathon #2, the Baystate Marathon. I’ve only just started paging through it, but so far it seems like a pretty awesome resource! It has beginner, intermediate, and advanced training plans for both half marathons and marathons. My mom and I will both have to read through it some more, but I’m definitely thinking this one will be worth a review here on the blog!

On Sunday, I went for a nice, quick 3-miler followed by some burpees, bear crawls, and lunges in the backyard. I’m just going to say it – I hate burpees. I basically never did them before and now I kind of wish I could go back to the state of blissful ignorance where I didn’t really know how hard they are, but given that I’m doing a Spartan race in 2 weeks, it seemed like a good idea to semi-prepare for it.

And this GIF pretty much sums up how I’m feeling about that.

After that, I went with my parents to take Brady and Keeper to a nearby field where they can run around and swim in the pond. I cannot begin to put into words the excitement/love Brady has for these outings (he sounds like a crying baby when he realizes where he’s going). As always, he had an absolute blast jumping into the water and chasing his tennis ball.

So overall, a pretty great weekend for running and being outdoors! God, I love the summer. 🙂