Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon Training Week 3

Monday Planned: GA+Speed 6 miles with 6x100 strides
Monday Actual: GA+Speed 6 miles with 6x100 strides in 86 degrees. This watch face will never get old. Also I need to start charging my iPod for these color runs.

Tuesday Planned: Recovery 4 Miles
Tuesday Actual: Rest, foam rolling and core.

Wednesday Planned:  9 miles with 2x1200, 2x1000, 2x800 
Wednesday Actual: 60 minute POWER session in the morning, and I was off at noon so I attempted my speed work at the track. Woof. It was so hot and humid, but I was bound and determined to do it. Until I wasn't. It was so hot, and so humid (oh did I already say that??) and there were waves of heat coming off from the black track making the breathing stifling. I did the first two 1200s, and then just had to leave. I was cooking, and burning, and I was a mess. Uff da.

Thursday Planned:  Rest
Thursday Actual: Rest. I considered finishing my workout from Wednesday, but the weather was identical and I wanted to spend some time with Kyle before he went out of town. Also, I was really sick or running by myself. Blah.

Friday Planned: Recovery 3
Friday Actual: I had plans to meet up with Jessica for the coffee run, but woke up to lightning so I went back to bed.

Saturday Planned: Endurance 10 miles
Saturday Actual: 10 mile long run. I woke up to another round of storms, and had to teach yoga mid-morning, so that left 12:30pm as the time to run long. In 80 degrees and a million percent humidity. But I did it! And survived! And check out how salty my hat is. Barf.

Sunday Planned: Rest
Sunday Actual: Rest

Total Mileage Planned: 32 miles
Total Mileage Actual:  19.33 miles 

Weekly Reads: American Panda

American Panda is a new teen/YA book from Gloria Chao. This book came highly recommended from a co-worker, and seems to be on trend with other books I've read recently with parental/cultural expectations and teens rebelling against them to figure out who they are. I think teen girls would love this book. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot about her culture and traditional upbringing. Give it a read if you want a sweet teen book.

My review: 4 stars

Summary from goodreads:

An incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate.

At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents' master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies.

With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can't bring herself to tell them the truth--that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese.

But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels?

May in Review

Total Miles:  118.33 miles up from 64.64 miles last month.  70.7 miles last May. 3rd highest May mileage, only behind 2010-2011 aka the years of alllllll the PRs. #progress And that's with a race that I tapered and recovered from. Whoop!

Total Time: 20:06:49 up from 10:28:03. 

Total Runs: 20 runs for an average of 5.92 miles/run.

Highest weekly mileage: 

	4/30/2018 – 5/6/2018: 32.1 mi 5:19:02 9:56 / mi

Most hardcore run: 10 miles in 93 degrees. Mental toughness and heat training at its finest. Or my 12 mile long run, solo, with a dead iPod in 98% humidity. Uff da. If grandma's is hot, I'm ready for it! (*please don't be hot!!*)

Favorite run: Toni and I had 9 miles worth of interval work on the track. It was hard but it was fun to knock out some hard repeats!

Favorite Race: I suppose I should say Brookings half, but I didn't really enjoy it.

Favorite Jam: I need some new music. What do you have for me?!

Three Things: Endurance Work

The second area of improvement I'm focusing on this summer, and has been one of my biggest areas of focus for 2018 is endurance work. To run a marathon, it's incredibly important to have a strong endurance base to carry you through hours of running and racing. At the start of 2018 I told Toni that my goal was to not miss a long run this year. If there is a run on my schedule that I'm apt to miss, it's the long run. Easy runs, fun! Speed work, you bet! Group runs, duh! Long run, meh..... that sounds hard. But a podcast I listened to in late 2017/early 2018 said that the best thing you can do to improve your running performance is to have a consistent long run practice. Game on.

Up until March when I had my knee issue, I stuck with that goal, and luckily for me I had the caveat of not skipping a long run "because I didn't want to." I will say with 100% certainty that I didn't want to skip the long runs when my knee was bothering me, but I had to. I did skip one long run while I was in Boston but I blame that on an unplanned night on the town and Jeri not being able to go out and have a good time like she used to be able to in her early 20s. Oops!

During our training cycle we'll have several long-long runs 14-20 miles. Uff da, that's a long way. We also have a lot of longer runs during the week ranging from 6-11 miles. Extra uff da. Anything to make that endurance base stronger to help me reach my marathon goal. PR or bust guys. Shoot, I should stop saying that. I think every time I've been PR or bust, I literally bust something during the race. I TAKE IT BACK. IGNORE EVERYTHING.

Moving on.

Luckily for me, I had a major shift somewhere over the last year and long runs really became fun. It's in large part to my BRF Toni, and the fact that a couple of hours running with her flies by in the blink of an eye. But it's also largely in part to the level of shape I'm in right now. It's been a long time since I've felt this strong and fit physically, and it's no longer an anxiety inducing event to go out and run 10-12 miles on the weekends. I will likely be singing a different tune when we're running 18-20 in the blazing heat in July/August, but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, just ask Kelly Clarkson.

Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon Training Week 2

Monday Planned: GA+Speed 8 miles 2 sets 4x150 strides
Monday Actual: 6 miles, a few strides, some walk breaks. All of the sun and very tired legs on gravel. Followed by an ice bath in the lake after. Magical.
























Tuesday Planned: Rest
Tuesday Actual: Rest + massage.

Wednesday Planned:  GA 7 Miles
Wednesday Actual: GA 8 miles, 4 miles before yoga and 4 after.

Thursday Planned:  10 miles, 5 @ LT
Thursday Actual: I opted to swap the 10 miles with workout for the 10 mile long run since Saturday will be so much nicer. 10 degrees in 93 degrees made me feel like a rock star.

Friday Planned: Recovery 3 Miles
Friday Actual: 3 Miles of recovery. I waited until it was way too hot, and after Thursday night's run, I was just pooped/wiped. I ended up walk/running a lot the second half of the run. 

Saturday Planned: Endurance 10 Miles
Saturday Actual: During work on Friday, I tweaked my knee moving some furniture and spent the rest of the day limping horribly. It felt better Saturday but I opted to take a rest day. Spent a lot of time icing, ibuprofen, and foam rolling. I wanted to do my long run on Sunday, but Toni was my voice of reason and required me to rest another day. Probably smart with grandma's half just two weeks away!

Sunday Planned: Rest
Sunday Actual: Rest, more ice, foam rolling.

Total Mileage Planned: 38 Miles
Total Mileage Actual:  27 miles

Weekly Reads: One of Us Is Lying

One of Us is Lying is the new big, teen book that everyone is reading. I picked it up in hopes that I could finish it before our next meeting to discuss books for our South Dakota teen book of the year, as I had seen everyone rave about it and didn't want it spoiled at the meeting! It was good, a fast read, but I had it pretty well figured out about halfway through the book. Still a good twist and turny mystery.

My rating: 4.5 stars

Summary from goodreads:

The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, One of Us Is Lying is the story of what happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive. Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide. 

Pay close attention and you might solve this.

On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.
Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule. 
Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess. 
Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.
Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.
And Simon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High's notorious gossip app.

Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention, Simon's dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn't an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he'd planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who's still on the loose? 
Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them."

Recent Realization

This post was supposed to be about my Sioux Falls Parks & Rec 5k Goals for tonight. But instead it's a post about over-racing. I am someone who loves to race. This winter/spring it was so fun setting multiple PRs--1 mile, 4 mile, 5 mile, wahoo! And while I think I did a good job of fitting those races into our training plan, I suspect that I have been over-racing a bit. Oops.

I've been listening to a ton of training podcasts and continuing to read a bunch of training books, and one of them recently struck me. It talked about 2-3 goal races a year. Uh... we've had 2-3 goal races just from April to June. :/ When we signed up for Grandma's Half, we had also planned to do the Brookings half, assuming one would be better weather than the other, and it would give us two good shots for a strong race day. And then 605 Running Co. announced their first ever spring half, and we just had to sign up for that too. And we had that Chicago half marathon fun run in January, and a bunch of little tune up races along the way. Uff da, I'm tired just typing all of this!

When I was first getting back into running again a few years ago, I had a blast doing the summer and fall 5k series put on by the city. They were a huge mental boost to see where my training was, and also a good excuse for me to run hard for 3 miles each week for speed work. In those early days, that speed work was around 9 minute pace, maybe faster, so it wasn't a big deal to recover from. Somewhere in the last 6 months I think I failed to take into account race recovery. I enjoyed racing on tired legs because I wasn't specifically tapering for my goal race, and being thrilled with the results.

I had originally planned to run the 5k tonight, as it's the only 5k of the June series that doesn't conflict with the half. And then I realized that this is my last big-ish week of training for this cycle, and it's more important that I get some strong miles in without overly taxing my legs for race day. So no 5k for me.

I'm glad I had this realization now instead of later in the year as the marathon gets closer. It's also helping me to see our 2019 race plan in a new light. I guess this is why people have coaches, huh? :)