Illinois Prep Top Times

Yesterday I raced at the Illinois Prep Top Times meet in Bloomington, which serves as our “Indoor State”, although it isn’t affiliated with the IHSA. I was 7th in 9:57. “Stepping stone” is the term I would use to describe this race. I feel that I’m in the right place for this point in my training cycle. Honestly, I'm really confident with where I'm at right now. I feel that the specific work that I’m doing is going to keep building on it’s self over the next few weeks, and that I’m going to be in very good shape come the end of May if everything goes according to plan. I can’t speak for any of the guys training that finished ahead of me, but knowing a few of them I’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’re doing, and when you’re running huge PRs or 9:30 indoors, where are you going from there? I'm confident my aerobic base is better than most of theirs and know I'll be ready to race my fastest when it matters most.

I’m excited to see my workouts progress over the next few weeks. The few specific two mile workouts that I’ve done have been just been run at 75s (5:00/mi pace) and I ran 9:57 off of those. So the goal moving forward is to get those workouts to feel just as easy when running 74s, and then 73s, and so on. 

Log:

Sunday - 12mi Long Run. Kept GPS off, just ran around Spring Lake for 1:21:00 (6:45/mi). Felt good. Ran the trails for a long time, and some on the roads and XC course as well. 6x10sec Hill Sprints/Flat Sprints after. Felt strong and fast.

Monday - 9mi easy in 1:00:54 (6:46/mi)

Tuesday - Windy. At Knox College track because our team had a small indoor meet there. 2mi warmup, drills and strides; 12:30 tempo run on the track covering 2.2 miles (5:41/mi); change into flats- 2x800 in 2:30 with 200m jog, and 4x400 in 1:15 with 100m jog. Hit each split perfectly (within the second) and felt pretty relaxed; 2mi cool down in 14:05 (7:03/mi) and some more strides. Total of 9mi counting jog rests and strides.

Wednesday - 6.5mi recovery in 45:05 (6:56/mi). 4x200m relaxed after progressing from 2mi gear to mile gear: 37.16, 36.28, 36.28, 35.34. (Tot. 7mi)

Thursday - 7 miles easy in 47:11 (6:46/mi) and 6-8x80m strides

Friday - 5min shakeout inside, some stretching,1.12 miles outside with some strides and a 200 at race feel (slow), jog back to shirk center, more relaxed running inside (they were behind schedule) with some quicker stuff and strides right before, Race 3200m IPTT in 9:57, after procrastinating on the cooldown for too long from talking to various runners that I don't get the chance to talk to that often I did about 6min inside and then an extra 3.11 miles outside for about 4mi total cooldown. (Total of 9mi)

Saturday - Easy 8mi at Spring Lake in 56:00. Had GPS off and just ran by feel. Felt really good, probably too good to have ran a race the day before. The temperature was too cold for my liking in the Spring (35 degrees with a 22 degree wind chill), but once I got into the woods it felt a lot better without the wind..

Total: 61 miles. General Strength/core just about every day but two, with a very good core workout today with hurdle drills and other mobility stuff.


Another good week.

The last few months I’ve been experimenting with monitoring my resting/sleeping heart rate to gauge my fatigue level and to see how it fluctuated based on the various training that I have been doing. I’m not going to put much of that data up this week, as I don’t have the time to do that, but that might be something to add to the log. The first week that I did it I found that my resting heart rate dipped below 40 bpm a few times throughout the night, hitting around 38 bpm for the lowest point. I didn’t wear the heart rate monitor to bed much early on this week, but I did the last few days. For example, my average heart rate for the 8.5 hours that I slept the night before my race on Friday was 47 bpm, and I felt pretty good that Friday. Last night I averaged 50 bpm, which really isn’t much of a jump, but it shows how heart rate fluctuates during varying levels of fatigue. It’s definitely an interesting (and nerdy) thing to do. I'll try to post more of this info in the next few weeks

Our team races a lot (too much), and has a pretty hectic meet schedule, especially in April. I’m trying to change that. With over 20 races on the schedule in less than a 3 month period, that’s too much. When racing that much you can’t train optimally and it jleads to burn out. Soo..We have two meets on the schedule this week, with both of them being small and at home with little overall importance. I won’t be racing the one on Monday, and on Thursday I’ll just be running the mile. I should be able to get in a few good workouts and put in some good mileage with no important races to worry about. 

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some pics of the week up and a race video.

Thanks for reading

-John