Week 8 down and I am still making progress. Even though Week 7 was a bit rough and I had to modify Monday, I was able to stick with the rest of my plan for the week and it really paid off. When I have these good weeks, it really just solidifies the point that you need to stick with training plans as much as possible to see the benefits.

Monday 12/21

With me doing the two days of 3 mile runs, I was a bit more tired on Monday than I expected, so I ended up doing an easy trainer ride for 34 minutes instead of the planned 3.25 mi endurance run. Even though my legs were a bit stiff and my back was a little sore, it felt really good riding to loosen myself up. I know I have said this before, but I really need to be doing yoga or other stretching-related exercises on days like this.

Tuesday 12/22

With me feeling loose again, I went to do my run. My plan was for a 1.75 mile tempo run, but I for some reason I thought it was 1.5 miles, so that’s what I ended up doing. I went hard at 7 mph and overall I felt pretty good. My Apple Watch had some gaps again in tracking, and I am really not sure why. I am wondering if my watch was too close to my wrist and as I started sweating it moved into place and tracking turned out fine afterwards. I might play around with this more.

Wednesday 12/23

For my rest day, like I usually do, I did a trainer ride. It was a late workout, so I just did an easy pace for 43 minutes.

Thursday 12/24

It’s Christmas Eve and the plan was 5 x 400 m intervals. As usual with interval workouts, I do the whole interval instead of following Galloway. Once again, the HR tracking was not working well early on and then it was fine for the rest of the workout. I forgot to notice how I had my watch on, so I’ll keep trying to remember to check that before each workout. Regardless, I did my 5 intervals and surprisingly my max HR stayed pretty consistent for intervals 3 through 5. I am pretty excited to see this trend. It means that my endurance is starting to finally improve. I did my intervals at 7.2 mph and I definitely cannot go over this speed at this point. However, I am hoping to start bumping up the speed in a few weeks if all goes well.

Friday 12/25

Christmas Day and I was out of my usual excuses, so I got in my NTC workout, which was Lunges and Length. I did my usual NTC warm-up to get loose, then tackled the 30 minutes workout. With not doing much strength in a while, the amount of lunges was definitely tough. My main issue with the NTC workouts is that NRC is assuming a certain level of strength and conditioning, which I just don’t have yet. My Saturday workout is my long run, and doing these strength routines the day before a long run is tough. However, I don’t want to do these strength workouts before a speed workout either, because that could also be bad. In theory, it makes sense before a long run since the pace is supposed to be easy where you could hold a conversation with someone. However, without that base level they are expecting, it makes things a bit difficult. I might need to either modify the NTC workouts or do something custom.

Despite doing my NTC workout, which was challenging, and my warm-up, Apple still didn’t give me my 30 minutes of exercise or enough Move calories. Therefore, I also hopped onto the trainer for 20 minutes, going at a moderate resistance. Somehow my HR didn’t really get too high though, even though I was sweating like crazy.

• 

• 

Saturday 12/26

I was a little sore today from my NTC workout. However, it wasn’t as bad as expected, so I did my NTC warm-up to loosen up. I then did my usual 5 minute warm-up walk at 3 mph, then started my run. The plan was for 6.5 miles. I felt pretty good for the run. As usual for a long run, I want at 6 mph for the run, and 3 mph for the walk. For the most part, I hit almost all of my intervals. This was a HUGE milestone for me, as I usually miss a ton, especially towards the end. Overall, my mile splits were pretty good. You can easily tell I was getting tired at mile 4 and got some energy for my final kick. Overall, even with my 5 minutes warm-up walk, I am averaging 11:21 per mile, which, if you remove that warm-up impact, puts me in the upper 10 minute per mile range. This is exactly where I want to be in terms of progression. At this rate, I think I am on track to hit my goal of 10:00 per mile by race time.

The only thing that was frustrating was that Apple Run app show a total distance of 7.13 miles, even though I did 6.75 miles. I usually do an extra .25 miles since my warm-up walk is always .25 miles and I usually don’t count that for my overall distance. Even though the distance was off by more than I expected, it wasn’t as bad as the Nike watch app, so that was a plus. Also, there was only 1 small point that the HR had issues tracking. I have two theories right now on the distance issue; 1) I was adjusting my watch a bit more than usual because it was sliding around or 2) I was fumbling a bit with doing the segments (double-tap on the screen) so maybe that inconsistent movement confused the gyroscope or accelerometer.

Sunday 12/27

My legs were very dead today. This was fine since it was a scheduled rest day. However, it was also cleaning day, so I pretty much closed all my rings from that. I was feel extra tight after cleaning though, so I hopped on the bike for 10 minutes just to loosen up. This actually worked out really well and I wasn’t very sore. As I always say, I probably should have done some yoga, but I’ll get there at some point.