Not Quite According To The Plan

Well, we made it home safe and sound from Barcelona and that means that it's back to the old grindstone as far as half-marathon training goes. I woke up early this morning in order to make up a little bit of the mileage that I didn't do and since I could have probably gone to the gym yesterday when we got home (Drew managed to go) and I opted to sit on the couch and catch up on the DVR, I figured that even though Wednesdays are typically rest days, I should suck it up and get running.

Right as I was walking out the door, I realized that I had no idea what the plan was for today. I ran back in, looked at a print-out I have at home, and then headed off to the gym. Except, apparently I'm a really bad reader since I thought that I was supposed to be doing this: 4 miles, including 4 x 1:00 AI + 5-6 GP when in fact I should have been doing this: 2 miles / 5-7 x 1:00 AI / 2 miles.

Not really that big of a deal when you look at the total mileage and I don't really know that it matters in the long run, but it does bring up a question that both Kristin and I had about the "including" in the first workout. I thought that they were part of the 4 miles in the above workout not in addition to. I did, however, think that the 5-6 pickups were in addition to the 4 miles. I guess it doesn't really make a huge difference, but I'm going to keep thinking that when it says including, it means including.

So, I did my four miles with 4 intervals thrown in. I did the intervals at 7.5, 8.0, 8.0 and 7.5 respectively. Nothing too exciting. There was some sort of a class going on in the studio in front of the treadmills that kept me entertained for a part of the run. I also tried listening to some different music (a bit more mellow than usual) and somehow that really helped. Not sure it helped my pace any, but it was a nice change.

After the main run, I did my pickups. Apparently I really can't read because in the plan that I thought I was doing, you were supposed to do 5 or 6. And I somehow thought that I was supposed to do 7. Oh well. Didn't hurt anything. Well, that's not entirely true. I did all the pickups for somewhere between 20-30 seconds. I did the first 4 pick-ups at 9.5 speed. Everything was going fine until the 4th one. And then I got this shooting pain right above my right knee.

So, admission: this is not the first time that this has happened. But I just didn't want to think about it before as I thought maybe it was a fluke. It was a similar situation last time as well - when I was sprinting and it took maybe a day to go away (but only really hurt when I pressed on it). Like any good triathlete, I thought that I should just see how it felt if I kept going with the pickups, so that's what I did. I did three more pickups at 8.5 speed and felt fine. I felt a little twinge every now and then, but nothing major, so I was glad that I finished up the workout. I gotta say that these pickups don't do anything for my overall pace since there is so much walking involved as recovery in-between, but I understand the reasoning for doing them.

I'm going to try to follow the actual plan tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. I also should mention that my HR monitor had a low battery and I sent it in for a new one, which is why my statistics are so old school at the moment. I did get an e-mail that it's on its way back to me, so I'm hoping it'll be here by the end of the week!

Running
Time: 41:37
Distance: 4.0 miles
Pace: 10:24/mile

Pickups
Time: 20:37
Distance: 1.65
Pace: 12:29/mile