Recovery Week

As promised, here a little recap of my first week of training towards the 10k in Stanford, 4 weeks from now.

It is important to start a new cycle completely fresh and ready to go, so instead of seeing it as the first week of training towards Stanford, the week was really just a very easy week to recover & recharge after indoors. I started this week with 2 days off (Which gave me the chance to finally try out the school’s new climbing wall!) followed by one easy run every day for the rest of the week, no doubles. Ian told me to go by feel and that if I would run only as little as 45min every day, that would be fine with him, as long as I would start feeling good again.

The first more serious run back was today; a 1h25-1h45 long run at a decent pace. We didn’t have official practice because most girls are home for Spring Break, so instead of our usual Sunday-spot in the forest, some of my teammates and I drove to Sauvie Island for the run, which has a 12 mile paved loop. I was excited to do something a little bit more serious again, especially after hearing about all the good performances of my family members & teammates at home in the City Pier City Run, a race I used to look forward to for weeks when I was younger. It was exciting to notice that my legs were feeling good again, and my teammate Anna and I were hitting a pretty good pace from the beginning without much effort. I remember that I said to Anna that we were lucky with the dry weather and with the lack of wind. Well, the lack of wind changed as soon as we made a turn about halfway into the loop - the wind started to blow full force in our faces! We were pretty glad that after a few miles we made another turn, expecting the wind to go away, but the wind didn't really subside, which made for a tough second part of the run! I decided that 21km was enough for me, especially because of the fast pace (we averaged about 4.10/km), and I stopped after about 90 min. Next week we will have a much slower long run, but we will run longer, closer to 2 hrs.

The most exciting thing about today is that instead of trying to stay awake and struggling through homework for the rest of the Sunday (If you have ever done a hard long run you must know that concentrating and getting work done are the last things you want to do when you are done!), I can nap and relax because it is Spring Break!

Tomorrow will consist of some very slow, easy running to recover from today and to get ready for the first workout on Tuesday, which I will talk about next week. For now, I think I might see what is left of my German-listening-skills and try to find documentary #3 about the Russian doping-scandal that just came out. Apparently, Russia is still not following the rules and keeps supplying doping to their athletes, which makes it likely that the entire country will be banned from participating in the Olympics this summer. Very sad, but at least some courageous German journalists were able to find out just exactly what is going on in that country, and hopefully it means that our sport will be cleaner in the future.