Running (mostly) pain free
The big news from today is that I did a scheduled run and it was pretty much pain free. It wasn’t perfect, but the discomfort I felt was more like tightness or the remnants from the bruise on my hip rather than feeling like a muscle strain or something worse. I’m still not totally out of the woods and we’ll have to wait and see how it feels later tonight and tomorrow morning, but right now I’m confident that it’s near the end of the mending process. This week was a scheduled recovery week (only 8.5 hours of training), so I’m using it to slowly get myself back into running. Including tonight’s run have four 30 minute runs scheduled and they’re all supposed to be easy, low intensity runs. Based on my heart rate, tonight I ran a little harder than I was supposed to, but I think the days off and the cold contributed to my heart rate being a bit high.
This morning’s swim wasn’t so great. I swam the scheduled distance and my pacing was pretty good, but it was the first swim in a while where I had that “swimming-through-mud” feeling. My stroke length was a little shortened and I didn’t have that extra kick in my stroke. I couldn’t really accelerate without feeling like I was flailing. The main set consisted of 9×300 with 50 yards of kicking after the fourth and seventh set. I would have liked to keep those 300’s right around 4:45-4:50, but for the most part, they were between 4:55-5:00. That doesn’t sound like much, but a few extra seconds per 100 yards really is a difference. And I could feel it today.
Swim – March 7
Distance: 3,600 yards
Time: 1:13
Run – March 7
Distance: 3.75 miles
Time: 31 minutes
Average heart rate: 139
Course: Manhattan streets and Washington Square Park
Conditions: Cold (21 degrees, but it felt warmer than that), clear