As I continue to review my training throughout 2007 here is the second installment of my attempt to provide thoughts, insights, and other information from it for you. I trained for 3 major events this year, the Indy 500 Mini Marathon, Bears of the Blue River 10K, and Midsouth Half Marathon. Read part 1.

After the Mini Marathon, I took it easy for a few weeks training wise and ran a couple of races. (I started this blog on May 28th). I wasn’t training for anything specifically until about mid-June. I raced each Thursday night with the Anderson Road Runner’s Thursday Night Point Series. This was a 2.64 mile race that was run every week around Shadyside park in Anderson. They provided good opportunities for speedwork but didn’t always fit well into the training schedule. My overall mileage was still pretty low and not running very many 5 day weeks. This was all just base-building workouts with a couple of races thrown in for speed!

I didn’t actually begin the Cool Running 10K Advanced Workout until the end of June. The advanced program is for runners averaging 40-60 miles a week and who expect to run between 34 and 40 minutes. It includes more speedwork and pace work. This was the same program I have used in previous years with good success.

I missed the first 3 weeks because of my lack of planning ahead. I decided to begin training for the Bears of Blue River 10K because I had enjoyed it both times I’d previously run it and also because it was a money race! I always enjoy getting money!!

I hadn’t missed a lot of training and my mileage wasn’t too far off what was required up to that point, so I jumped right in. Throughout the program I was able to train a lot more consistently than during the Mini training. I ran 5-6 days a week and maintained about 30 miles a week training. My mileage peeked at 44.

Even with the improved consistency I still missed a lot of the speed work and some of the longer runs or changed the schedule around. This plan mostly did speed work on Mondays and Thursdays with a long run on Saturday. This fit pretty well with my schedule, except for the Thursday races. I mixed and matched my speedwork. For example, one week I was supposed to do a 14 mile run on Saturday with 8×800 on Monday with 6-7 hills on Thursday and race a 5K on Saturday. There was a group running 15 on Sunday so I did that, and ran 6×1000 meter repeats on a set of hills called Spaghetti Bowl at Mounds on Weds. We missed the Thursday night run because of vacation! My thought was to combine the speed workout and the hill workout into 1 day and not need to run two different workouts. This wasn’t brilliant! Each workout has a specific purpose and benefits. Mixing the two doesn’t necessarily reap the benefits of both. I also missed a couple of long runs, one weekend I was in KY for a wedding and didn’t have the energy and time for the 12 miler. Another weekend was a 5K race in the points series, so I rode my bike the 11 miles there, raced the 5K, and rode my bike 11 miles home. It was a good cross-training day.

Most of my “bad” pain was gone and everything was looking good for me, I thought. I felt like most of my runs were solid, turning in decent interval splits based on my goal pace, even though some of my actual race performances weren’t especially exciting. I wasn’t coming close to my PR at any distance, but did run some of the same races as before at the same or better times. Most noticeably an almost 2 minute PR at the Buzzards Roost 10K and and only being off my Chesterfield 10K time by 20 seconds from last year. Both without any real rest time.

Everything felt great going into the race. I took it easy during the Thursday night race, but early in the week I had been having some stomach concerns. Nothing major but my stomach felt a little queasy before, during, and after running. It had pretty much gone away by Thursday.

However, on race morning we made 2-3 bathrooms stops during the hour drive to the race. This wasn’t normal pre-race jitters but was diarrhea. Not good before a race of any distance! I’m guessing by race time I didn’t really have any nutrients left in my body! This pretty much negated much of my training. But I think we all know that we can’t always plan for everything and that sometime extraneous issues affect our running.

You can read my full race report, but my time was 43:02 with these splits 6:37, 6:22, 6:59, 6:44, 7:20, 7:30, 1:27

Don’t get me wrong, I was very frustrated with my performance. I was glad that my legs felt fine during most of the training and that my body was able to handle the stress of summer training and competition.

Graph it!

This is a graph from my online training log.

Technorati tags: Training, Analysis, 10K