This was an interesting week. First off, Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you had a safe New Years celebration. For my wife and I, we had homemade pizza and bubbly. It was so good! We tried watching the ball drop, but there were not a lot of good options since we have been coord-cut for years. And since there are a lot of coord cutters, the streaming sites were flooded, so half the time the feed would just cut out. Oh well.

From a training standpoint, this was what I like to call a Learning Week. The week started out really well. I substituted a day out doing lots of walking for one of my runs. I stuck to my other workouts though. However, as I’ll go into more detail later on, my NTC workout, even though I had modified it slightly, still beat me up so much that I wasn’t able to recover in time to do my long run. So, I missed my long run this week. I was frustrated, but I definitely learned a lot.

For starters, I think the planned NTC workouts are too much for me right now, even with modifying them. Therefore, I am going to look through the vast NTC catalog and see if there are replacements I can use for my Friday NTC days. Next, and on a really positive note, I saw that my improved consistency is really starting to pay off. My tempo runs went exceptionally well, with me hitting all of my Galloway intervals. Overall a great week, even if I did miss my long run.

Monday 12/28

NRC called for a 3.5 mile endurance run. I didn’t wake up early enough for this, but I wasn’t too bummed I skipped it. My wife and I went to the Philadelphia Zoo for a couple of hours and got in a ton of walking. It was a bit chilly, but it felt great and we love seeing the animals. It was busy at the zoo, but everyone did a great job social distancing and lines to see the animals were not too bad. The zoo attendants did a really good job at keeping things moving. Sadly, we couldn’t see any of the indoor animals, as those exhibits were closed since you can’t really social distance in there.

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Tuesday 12/29

NRC called for a 2.5 mile tempo run. I was feeling really loose after my NTC warm-up, so I did my tempo at 7 mph. Wow did my HR get high at 158. For me, that’s pretty high for running. However, I was able to keep my Galloway intervals on point. This meant 2 minutes at 7 mph, 30 seconds at 3mph. I have noticed that overall Apple Watch’s native running app is way more accurate than Nike’s WatchOS app for treadmill running.

Wednesday 12/30

Today was a rest day, so I did a trainer ride in the afternoon. I wanted to do a ladder for resistance, so I ramped up the resistance every 10 minutes after a 5 minute warm-up. Got in a 45 minute ride and it felt really good. I am really antsy for the Tacx Flow Smart Trainer to get released so I can start doing more with my trainer rides. Garmin’s site says early 2021, so I am crossing my fingers. Smart trainers are typically so expensive, so I have never bought one before. But this day wasn’t over yet.

Another zoo day! This time we went to Elmwood Park Zoo. We went for the Wild Lights event. Basically, they have the park decorated and lit up. It’s almost like going to another park. The only problem with this being a much smaller zoo is that it was tough to social distance. At some points when we wanted to see some of the animals who were up at night, we had to quickly move through or miss seeing the animals because nobody was keeping a good distance. Therefore, we didn’t visit any other spots where we couldn’t keep our distance. Another great time despite it being super cold. As always, we love seeing the animals. We were a little sad though, since there isn’t a lot of distance between the guests and the animals, some of the animals were clearly stressed out from the people.

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Thursday 12/31

Today was suppose to be a benchmark run. However, since I cannot use the Nike iOS app, doing a benchmark workout is pointless. Therefore, I did a 2.6 mi tempo run. For the 2 minute segments, I did 7 mph and for the 30 second walks, I did 3 mph. Overall I felt really good and was able to nail all of my intervals again. I am so excited to be seeing this much improvement!

Friday 1/1

NRC called for some strength training via NTC. The workout was Cut to the Core. I am not going to sugarcoat this; it kicked my butt. For a functional strength workout, my HR got up to 131, which usually doesn’t happen unless I am doing a moderate HiiT workout. When I got done the workout, my legs and arms were shaking. I also felt a bit nauseous, so I grabbed one of my Honey Stinger Cracker Bars. That seemed to do the trick. I am getting concerned that even though the NTC workouts are very helpful, my body takes too long to recover, which impacts my long runs. I will probably need to start looking into extreme modification of the NTC workouts or I will need to look into an alternative.

Despite killing myself with the NTC workout, I still didn’t close my rings. So I hopped on the trainer for about 16 minutes at a moderate resistance to wrap things up. Having the Honey Stinger bar plus doing this short ride did help me loosen up a bit.

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Saturday 1/2

As expected, my whole body was wrecked from my NTC workout. Therefore, I did another moderate resistance trainer ride for 38 minutes. I wanted to hit 45 minutes, but I did not have the energy.

Sunday 1/3

My worst fear came true; the NTC workout was so rough that I was still not recovered on Sunday. I was doing much better than Saturday though. Therefore, I did another ladder trainer ride. I went for 55 minutes, and only increased the resistance every 15 minutes. Overall the ride felt good but I am not happy I missed my long run for this week. I don’t want to mess up my upcoming week, so I am not going to try to get in my long run on Monday. I will just tackle Monday like any new week.

• Lesson 1: A functional strength session the day before a long run is actually a good thing. However, not having a solid enough base for the scheduled workout will lead to slower than ideal recovery. In this case, it meant I missed my long run, which I really need. Therefore, find functional strength routines that challenge you, but not to a point where you are not fully recovered the next day.
• Lesson 2: It’s okay to modify a workout. For example, a NTC workout might call for rocking planks. Instead, just do a normal forearm plank, and maybe hold for less time. This way you are still building up your strength, but not stressing yourself out so much that you will be too sore later.