Day 86

35 min jog in the morning, 80 min run in the evening.

Let's get the dumb dog owner rant out of the way now, and quickly: I almost got hit by the handle of one of those flexi-leashes I'm always frothing about. Karma? The dog was attached to the leash, which was not attached to the owner; the dog bolted to my dog, then stopped suddenly, and the leash whipped about. I felt the handle whisk past my arm. Sounds implausible, but I was also hit by a golf ball once and a bird twice (not the same bird as far as I know but both times it was a starling, I think)...my luck isn't the greatest sometimes.

I feel like this bad karma is unwarranted because I was really polite and calm about a minor dog incident this morning, and what could have been a major one yesterday morning--some lady let her dog loose and it was tearing around, but fortunately this was a few hundred meters away and I was SO grateful that she collected the dog before we got near, especially since it was wearing a prong collar. A prong collar usually isn't a good sign when the animal is loose!

Anyway, the jog this morning was pretty much uneventful and relaxing. This afternoon, we ran 4 miles with my husband who is trying to shake a knot in his ankle. Then I started my intervals.

Run club was 2X 3K, which didn't really appeal to me. I decided to attempt VO2max intervals, seeing as my goal races (yes, with 5Ks, I can have two!) are 5-8 weeks away. This will give me four weeks of VO2, and then maybe another workout or two to sharpen up in between the races. So, today was a very modest 6X 2min hard/2 min easy. I was tired (I've been doing a lot of scrubbing in the house this week, grout, etc), so I didn't feel quite at the VO2max effort, but maybe that's because the intervals were so short! Not really sure. No lactic acid. My form felt good on some, not so good on others. I just tried to keep pushing myself without getting into a more sprinting kind of thing.

Anyway, I covered 0.29 miles, 0.29, 0.29, 0.29, 0.29, and then 0.28 (sucks that I couldn't go faster). The distances are rounded by Garmin, and I was sometimes a second off in hitting the lap button, so the paces I got ranged from 6:48/mile to 7:02/mile (the saggy last one). I'm going to program the workout next time so I don't have to fuss with the lap button. First I have to decide how much to increase the intervals.

Week 1: 2 min
week 2: 2.5 min
week 3: 3 min
week 4: 3.5 min

Something like that! Move up to 4 after the first race for a couple of weeks, and then a week off before the 2nd. hmmm.

After the workout, I did two 100 meter strides and then resistance exercises, including 80 sit ups. They're starting to get a little monotonous. Yeah, they start to hurt near the end (ok, today, the last forty or fifty hurt!), so I know they're useful, just boring to count that much. Maybe I need to integrate a medicine ball somehow.