20-26 February: Week in Review, and Club Challenge 10-Mile Report

Okay, dates, times, distances:

20 February: 10 miles (74 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
21 February: 4 miles (29 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
22 February: 6 miles (42 minutes), including a "tempo" Patterson Park loop
23 February: 3 miles (25 minutes), APG
24 February: 8 miles (56 minutes), Canton/Fells/etc.
25 February: 2.5 miles, Campus Hills speed loop, 3.5 miles, treadmill hill program (51 minutes total)
26 February: 6 miles in the morning (40 minutes), 5 miles in the afternoon (35 minutes), all Canton/Fells

Total Time: 352 minutes
Total Distance: 48 miles

Definitely a decrease in mileage from the past couple of weeks, but considering that I didn't have a 30-ish mile run thrown in there, still decent volume, and overall, an appropriate draw-down, considering that the runs on the 24th through the 26th felt awful.

And speaking of which, Club Challenge . . .

The Club Challenge 10-Mile Race, hosted by the Howard County Striders, is a race that I've made a point of doing for the past few years, since it's the major Falls Road Running team race of the year. That's the fun part. Everything else about the race - the brutally hilly course, the end-of-February-when-nobody-is-totally-in-shape-yet, the distance (which is too long to be run outright "fast," but too short to just rely on endurance) - is, well, challenging. Every year, I wind up questioning my sanity around Mile 4 of this race, and every year I wind up finishing anyway, and totally forgetting how bad I felt the next day. That said, this post will not fully convey how bad it felt, since I've already partially forgotten that, but rest assured, it was worse than however this sounds.

Since this is a "relatively" short race, a relatively short summary is in order: I started out at just over 6 minutes for the first mile, hit the second mile in around 12:20, the third mile in around 19:20, and after that, the hills started coming and really did me in. The first couple were okay, but after that, I have never felt such blinding, excruciating pain in my quads when climbing a hill. The pain gradually disappeared on the flats and downhills, but of course, after a few miles on that course, there is never enough of either to regain any sort of rhythm. I ended up finishing in 1:06:37, which is 12 seconds faster than what I ran last year, but 1:48 slower than my fastest time at that race (although I think that may have been run the year that the course was 0.15 miles short).

So, in a way, not really much different from last year, which leaves me wondering how to feel about my performance. It was a strange race, because the limiting factor was not my aerobic fitness, but the fact that past the third mile, my quads felt like they might explode at any second. Other than my quads, I felt fairly strong, so it may just be that insufficient recovery from my weight room sessions was the culprit. By comparison, last year, I had done a 20-mile run the day before the race, and was incubating some kind of cold, hence my mediocre performance. That said, last year, I think that I performed closer to my theoretical capacity at that point. Even if I had been less sick and tired on race day last year, I don't think I could have gone that much faster. This year, had I not come in on a "bad" day, I think I would have had a faster time in me.

All water under the bridge at this point, but it does point to increased volume and sharper, more aggressive speedwork as the way to build from here (surprise, surprise). The diet and core exercises and all that seem to be working at the moment, so no need to mess with any of them. Hopefully, a better test of where I am will come this Saturday, at the Seneca Greenway Trail 50K.