Fortunately, this weekend has been much better. Yesterday was a little cold, but other than that the roads were mostly clear and the snow didn't come until the late afternoon so it was a non-factor. As such, I increased my distance from the planned 4 miler to a 10km in order to make up for the lost mileage on Wednesday. The mixture of the nicer weather combined with the clear roads made this a much more pleasant run than I've had for a while.
Further, the weather today was as close to perfect as it gets around here. A nice warm 6C, little to no wind and sunny skies let me keep most of my winter gear at home and run in much more comfortable clothing than normal for this time of year. After running for a couple of months now wrapped up in winter clothing, it was certainly refreshing to be free of the toque, mittens and neck warmer ;)
Unfortunately, while the roads were in near perfect conditions many of the sidewalks weren't. While this isn't an issue on my shorter runs, as I can generally just switch to the road when necessary, with the longer runs I need to use some 80km/h arterial roadways that make it dangerous to leave the sidewalks. As such, portions of this run were much harder than usual (ie the choppy portions of the cadence/pace plots below), and in some parts I had no choice but to go out on the road if I wanted to keep running. Either way, once I got around the obstacles it worked out to be quite a nice day for a run, and plodding through the snow makes for good strength training ;)
With respect to my other sports, I managed to get most of my walking in this week, as well as all but one cycling session. Hopefully things will slow down a bit next week, and I'll be able to pick up the slack on this part of my training ;)One other upside this week is that my copy of Pfitzinger/Douglas' Advanced Marathoning 2nd edition finally showed up. For the last few weeks I've been using a copy of the first edition borrowed from the library, so there will be some minor changes in my schedule as the new book makes a few tweaks in the plan. The books are mostly the same, with a few minor differences (eg expanded supplementary training section, small tweaks to the schedules and the addition of an 85 mile/week program) but I figured with the update coming out it made more sense to get a copy of the new one.
Weekly Totals:
Running: 68.8km (43mi)
Walking: 32km (20mi)
Cycling: 80km (50mi)
Total: 181.8km (113mi)
Year to Date:
Running: 330.7km (205.5mi)
Walking: 117.4km (72.9mi)
Cycling: 415.0km (257.9mi)
Total: 863.1km (536.3mi)
For the upcoming week, I'll be adding my first long run with a section at race pace. That is likely going to be a good challenge to see how well I've progressed over the last few weeks, although there will likely be some learning involved. The one thing I will have to do, however, is find a better route for that run as plowing through snow will be a much larger problem when higher speeds are necessary.
Upcoming Week:
Mon 50K Cycle
Tue 9mi (14.5K) w/5mi (8km) at LT
Wed 30K Cycle + 5mi (8K) Recovery
Thurs 10mi (16.1K) Steady
Fri 50K Cycle
Sat 5mi (8K) Recovery
Sun 16mi (25.8K) LSD w/10mi (16.1km) at Marathon Pace
As the prices for the races that I'm looking at go up this month, I'm in the process of registering for them now. I registered for Around the Bay a few weeks back, and added the Achilles 5K last night. I'll probably be officially registering for the Mississauga Marathon in the next couple days as well, as it's price goes up and having that one locked in will likely help to motivate my training that much more. I'm still flirting with a few other options, as well as trying to work out what I want to do after this training cycle.
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