Week in Review: 22-28 May - Calm Before the Storm

For whatever reason, my recollection of the week that is the subject of this blog post is particularly fuzzy. Here's my best attempt at a re-construction:

22 May: 12 miles, in and around Patterson Park (100 minutes)
23 May: 8 miles, 3 of which were treadmill hill work (60 minutes)
24 May: 1 mile (10 minutes)
25 May: 6 miles, 3 of which were treadmill hill work (45 minutes)
26 May: 9 miles (70 minutes), in and around the Inner Harbor
27 May: 1 mile (10 minutes)
28 May: 20 miles, around the Inner Harbor, out to Homewood and back (155 minutes)

Total time: 450 minutes
Total distance: 56 miles

I sat on this post for a while, because I wasn't really sure what to think about this week of contradictions . . .

On the one hand, this was my lowest-volume week in quite a while. On the other hand, it included two of the highest-intensity treadmill workouts.

On the one hand, I had two nearly "off" days. On the other hand, I had my longest continuous road run (20 miles) since the Kentucky Derby Marathon at the end of April.

On the one hand, getting "up for the game" before and during every run seemed extremely difficult. On the other hand, afterwards, every run felt like no big deal.

On the one hand, nearly every mile seemed more painful and laborious than any of the miles I've run so far in 2011. On the other hand, the trend towards the end of the week was towards slightly less painful.

I think that my success so far this year is due at least in part to framing the effects of my training appropriately, and moving forward from that frame of reference. In less abstract words, I've been doing a better job this year figuring out exactly how spent I am from the training that I've done, and what level of training makes the most sense going forward. The context for this week is the most ambiguous yet, but here's my attempt to make sense of it:

MMT, as my first 100-mile race in a long time, was rougher on me than I thought. The physical and mental fatigue from the race were still lingering during this week, but I was recovering gradually nonetheless. The lower training volume was a natural consequence of the recovery process, but is not necessarily an indication that I'm "burned out" from the first half of the year, as evidenced by the fact that later in the week, I seemed to be running in less pain.

This weekend, the Old Dominion 100-Mile Run and the Bel Air Town Run 5K (a.k.a. my grand, ridiculous adventure) should be a much better indicator of whether or not that assessment is accurate. I won't make predictions here about how I think these will turn out, except to say that if I've assessed things correctly, the recovery process should be nearly complete by this weekend - just in time for another round. If not, well . . . it could be a long couple of days. But in either case, I'm excited about doing this classic-race double for the first time, and have no doubt that it will make for a far more memorable experience than this past training week.