January: 158.93 Miles

158.93 miles for January of this year. At this point last year, I was at 110.43 miles. I guess I'm really not following through with my resolution of reduced mileage; however, an overwhelming chunk of my mileage has been comfortable easy runs on a treadmill at my local gym. I am currently dealing with some piriformis inflammation on my right side, which I think stems from my accidental 16.6 miles this past weekend. Let me backtrack to this past weekend.

This past Saturday, it was about 48 degrees at about 8:45 AM. Keep in mind, this is the heart of wintertime in Central Illinois. It is literally January. This is one of the first times I had to plan a marathon training long run with a running partner. I have been living in the Champaign-Urbana area for over 4 and a half years, yet somehow I still managed to miss a turn which caused me to lengthen my run. A supposed 12 mile run turned into 15.6. My running buddy and I kept anticipating a turn onto a street that was never going to appear. Neither of us brought our phones for navigation. Coupled with my one mile warmup, this brought me at 16.6 miles for the day. I was hoping to hit just between 12 and 13 for the day. I think this excessively long run has caused me some inflexibility and inflammation for the past couple of days, but I will manage. I will have to really nurse myself with extra stretching and foam rolling. Tennis ball rolling and high density foam rolling will be key to alleviate tightness in the piriformis. Oh well. Here are some google map views of how far out my run was this past Saturday.

Now I guess I know for next time. Another good sign at the end of this month (actually today, which is the last day of the month) was a 6x800 workout. One of my resolutions for this year was to incorporate more speed into my weekly training. I would commonly run at least 1-2 workouts a year during the peak of my half marathon training, which I think was the key to my 1:23:16 half marathon PR in just my third half marathon ever. I started this workout with a 2 mile warmup on the treadmill just a shy bit above 7:45 pace. I then did 800 meter intervals on a 200 meter indoor track. After each 800 m, I would immediately go into a 400 meter jog at around 8:05 pace. After each of these sets, I would take a short break and repeat again. My intervals ranges from 2:37 to 2:42, so I'm pretty happy. One drawback to such a short track is just the sheer number of sharp turns necessary during such a a workout. This could definitely contribute to injury, but the easy running after each 800 and the proper cooldown and stretching should help eliminate these fears. Nonetheless, I feel great after this workout. As I type out this post after a full day in the lab, I am exhausted though. Nothing valuable ever came without sacrifice though. 

Well, it was a good January; I will have to be careful moving forward to make sure to properly recover, especially with more intense speed workouts and longer distance runs on the weekend. I plan to incorporate more tempo and lactate threshold efforts on my Wednesday workout days to eventually replace some speed and hill workouts. Time to move onto February!