Long time, no write. The last few days have been pretty. I do most of my writing at night and I haven't had much time at night lately to add to this. I've just been busy and tired. I've been quite the slacker when it's come to exercise lately. I guess I should have scheduled this week a bit better. Monday I did 20+ with a commute run and Tuesday I did speed work. Wednesday was a scheduled day off. Thursday I went to the gym, Friday I did V02/lactate test (more on that later) and Saturday did not involve any exercise. I will be doing my normal Saturday long run on Sunday, but this 4 day period from Wednesday through Saturday I will only have gone to the gym once and the bit of running I did at the fitness test on Friday. I'm thinking there aren't many training plans that have you drop back this far 2 months before the race. Anyway, starting Sunday, I should be back at it pretty good.
Today I did go kart racing at K1 Speed in Carlsbad. That was so much fun. I had done this type of racing before, but this was the first time doing those races with other people as aggressive as me. We did a 14 lap qualifying race when I ended up in 3rd place over .21 behind 2nd and .45 behind the leader. The calculated this based on start time rather then track position. I spun out twice. There was more then .46 seconds there which would have had me first. The 2nd race was a the final race that was 16 laps and we were placed in starting position from where we qualified. Since we had 21 of us out there, there was a fast group and a slow group. I qualified 4th and by the 2nd lap already, I moved into 3rd. Not more then 2 seconds after moving to third, the guy I passed rammed into the back of me and spun me out. He passed and allowed 4th place to pass me. After a few more laps I worked my way back to 4th place. He had a lapped guy in front of him. I found a corner and snuck in to pass both of them at the same time. At the point I was fully past, I had to slow a tick to get around the corner and the guy rammed me right into a way causing me to spin out. Damn! Back into 5th. I spent the next 6 laps working my way back up to the rear of 4th place. By the time I was ready to start thinking about passing again, the race was over. So I finished 5th overall. Not bad, I guess, but I definitely should have finished 3rd. Oh well, it was loads of fun. It's hard to get in your car after that and drive regular. You just want to floor it and fly around the corners.
As I mentioned earlier, I will be doing my weekly long run tomorrow. I'll be doing about 15-18 miles on pretty flat ground. As my running has really been lax lately, I don't expect this to be as easy as it has been. I was given a race number for the Carlsbad 5000 in place of a running buddy who has been nursing a sore ankle. This is supposed to be a really fast and fun race. I'd love to really race it, but as I'll be in the middle of 18 miles, I'm thinking that burning it out for 5K might make the rest of the run a bit tough. Since I'm running in my buddies number, I have to try represent at least a little bit.
Well, this has already run pretty long for the day. I'm going to save my lactate threshold testing until tomorrow's blog as I think it will take up at least one full journal entry. I have some thinking to do about my training. I'm hoping to hash out some details in tomorrow's blog to help me. I need to decide if I want to just continue running for fun or take it more serious and use the results from my fitness testing to generate a training plan that optimizes my gains in performance. I've gotten into a comfortable groove with my training which has been mostly base building, but I'll need to alter it a bit to improve speed and VO2 max. I think with the training that I currently do that I'll continue to improve, but it can be better and faster. It seems that the test results are recommending I follow the Joe Friel approach to periodize my training. I've pretty much been doing base build for the past few months. It's now time to start building on the base and up the intensity. That's basically what I got out of the test. On that note, we'll call it a night.
No comments:
Post a Comment