After a very solid running week last week, I felt terrible on my rest day yesterday. I think part of it was coming down with a cold, and the bigger part of it was allowing myself to become dehydrated. I ended up staying in bed for most of the time from 1pm yesterday to 5am this morning, drinking as much fluid as I could. By this morning I was feeling a LOT better, but still not at 100%. However, I was feeling good enough to give our run a try.
The scheduled workout today included….
- 15-minute warmup (easy pace)
- 20-minute tempo (6:30 to 6:45 pace)
- 10-minute active recovery
- 20-minute tempo (6:30 to 6:45 pace)
- 15 to 20-minute cool down (easy pace)
The conditions this morning were nasty. As I was walking through our house I noticed that our windows were covered with condensation, and knew we were in trouble. When I checked the weather it showed a temp of 74º with 95% humidity and a dew point of 73º.
Nathan and I started out from the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center and ran our 15-minute warmup on the Harpeth River Greenway and back into Edwin Warner. For the first tempo segment, we did 10-minutes out-and-back on the greenway behind Ensworth High School. I told Nathan as we started that I wanted to hang toward the upper end of the range since I had felt poorly the day before, and because we had 40 total minutes of tempo work.
During the first tempo segment I felt OK, but not great. The humidity was almost overwhelming, and I started having stomach issues about 5-minutes in that didn’t let up. However, we did keep the pace under 6:45 and finished the first segment with a 6:44 average. Because of the stomach issues I had to take a bio-break during the 10-minute recovery run, which was less than ideal.
I was pretty nervous about the second tempo segment because of how hard the first one had been. Nathan suggested that we try to run a negative split on the out-and-back since both of us were pretty tired. To that end we finished the first 10 minutes with our average around 6:50. Up to that point it was a struggle, though my stomach was feeling a bit better.
On the way back Nathan started to pull away and I thought I was toast. I just tried to maintain contact with him. All of a sudden with about 6-minutes to go I started to get a second wind, and caught back up just behind Nathan. We finished out pretty strong and dropped our segment average pace to 6:43. Just before we reached the finish Nathan yelled out “Beast Mode On,” which made me smile. That 20-minutes was really, really hard, but I’m proud that Nathan and I finished both of the tempo segments within the prescribed pace range.
Today was one of those days where I don’t think I would have been able to maintain pace without having Nathan to run with. It has been huge having someone to train with this summer.
We finished up with a 17-minute cool down back to the Nature Center. As we were running back toward the cars, we heard a loud BANG coming from Ensworth High School. This gave me quite a scare, and ultimately I have no idea what it was. It sounded like a gun, though I’m guessing it has something to do with all of the construction that is going on around campus. Because of our encounter with Ensworth Security a few months ago, Nathan and I joked that it must have been a runner cutting through their campus and this time they just shot him!
Overall we completed just over 10.5-miles with an average pace of 7:46 per mile. This was definitely not my best day, but I’m thrilled to have completed the workout without my best stuff. Not only do I want to give Nathan a big shout out for helping get me through today’s workout, but also for completing 51 total miles last week, which is his biggest mileage week ever. He’s getting really strong.
Beast Mode…ON!