That's right. My run this morning didn't go as planned. I had planned to test my new and improved legs on a long run of 10 miles this morning. Dr. Ball and I had been talking about me running up to 90 minutes this weekend, so I set that as the upper limit. I didn't know how fast I would go.
During yesterday's run, I threw in a few strides to see how that felt. It felt good--smooth. So, I decided today I would try the workout I had set for myself for this weekend a month ago. Back then, I was optimistic that, with enough rest from running, I would be able to slowly ramp up my mileage and would be running 50 miles this week with a 12-13 mile long run. My plan came from a book I bought after seeing mention of it on Camille Herron's fantastic blog. The book is called Speed With Endurance written by Bill Squires and Bruce Lehane.
One of the bread and butter workouts that repeats throughout all of the training plans is a long run with pick ups. You start with baby pickups and progress to some pretty long ones as you get deep into the trenches of his marathon training plan. My plan for today was to do 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2 minute pick ups spread throughout my long run. This looks something like 1 minute fast and smooth, 4-5 minutes at your long run pace, then another 1 minute fast but smooth and then back to your long run pace, etc.
So, my run went awesome. I ended up running 12 miles at 7:02 pace with the surges as planned and at 5k-10k pace. No pain. No soreness. Lots of smiling. I really enjoyed this workout, probably because I was running care free and pain free and surging with some speed. One big thing I noticed today was that paces that have felt labored to me lately felt easy breezy today. I talked with Dr. Ball about this today during treatment and asked whether this could be because I am finally healthy. In other words, I'm not fighting my body to make it run. I am actually running naturally again. He said that this is likely what's going on. This was also something I hadn't expected from my visit to see the Good Doctor: that I might become a faster runner simply because my body was not having to work so hard to run. Cool.
I am so excited to resurrect my training plan and get started on more of Squires' workouts next week. Coach T will make sure I am smart about reintroducing faster running gradually. I asked Dr. Ball today about whether speed work was in my future and he refused to weigh in. He said, "I'm not your coach. But you're healthy now to start training again." I'm taking that as a yes.