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- run 49:00, 9.20 km
warm and humid, T+DI 146. it's supposed to thunderstorm tonight and then get cool again, which will be a blessing. yesterday it T+DI was 170 (!) when i was walking home from work. 95 degrees and dew point 65. nasty.

calves felt fine, still a little stiff overall, especially back where i tweaked it yesterday.

19-05-26

Run -- 6.08k, 40:35

Notes

ahh missed running  (genuinely though). achilles basically fine today, which is good. obvs this was super slow, but effort was correspondingly low, avg hr like 113

excited to be back into normal training. after some meh showings at 5k and 10k in march april, the big 5k/half pbs really making feel good about training going forward. just got to accumulate the stacked weeks, which i'm getting pretty good at now.

eta: sounded kind of like hokum on my first pass, but rereading the bakken book and taking the muscle tone stuff more seriously in light of my peaking/tapering issues and the times when i do have periods where i just feel like i'm flying

- 34:34 x [4 min jog, 1 min walk]
calves felt normal. air did not: T+DI 158. tomorrow and wednesday are going to be just as bad or worse. 

careful volume rebuild: commence. will run easy on the track the rest of the work week, adding a bit of time each day, and see how that goes.

yesterday

- hike x ~5.5 miles
went down to shenandoah for the weekend, for our friend's birthday. calf felt normal. gonna run in a little bit.

17-05-26

Hackney Half - 1:26:46 

Notes

Pretty even pacing. 4:08 through 5k, 4:07 to 10k, 4:08 to 15k, 4:07 to the end. Had hoped to pick it up a bit more in the back half since I was feeling decent, but just couldn't manage it. Ks 18/19 were my two slowest (and lowest HR, excl first few Ks, only times I dipped below 170 for a km) but I rallied to manage 3:59 avg for the remaining 1.1k. I was running properly ragged though, form barely holding together esp in last 500m, don't think I could have managed to close any faster.

More hills than I'm used to. Should include some now and then to get used to it a bit more. Have seen some interesting stuff on doing repeated downhills as a good durability stimulus. No particularly good hills near me, but there's a big bridge through a park that's pretty long and steep, so could do the occasional sesh back and forth on that.

A month ago I said 'for the half, <1:30 is the 'i didn't waste my time' target, 1:28 the 'fairly happy with progress' target, and 1:25:xx the 'hell yeah' target". So yeah very happy!

ETA: according to watch, I managed a 40:10 10k and 19:58 5k during this. That's pretty cool. Had kind of hoped to have a sub 40 10k segment in the middle of this. Fwiw watch had it as 21.4, which makes splits hard (the ones I gave above, 4:07 etc, are from the official chips, so I trust those!). Not saying course is wrong, obvs watch imprecision + not running optimal route is the explanation.

eta2: learnings/observations
1 - more liquid calories during carb load. i did drink a fair bit of orange juice, but even though my solid carbs were easy to digest (white rice, pasta, low-fibre sliced white bread), my stomach still felt heavy. and i've been stuck in the bathroom feeling awful since i got home, haha, thankfully a non issue during the race, but stomach did feel heavy and i skipped my last planned gel because of this.
2 - got to work out what to do with taper! i never get the 'i jsut feel super fresh' feeling, i just kind of feel weird and out of form. also lower legs, PTT type thing, felt terrible last 10 days on both sides.. might be worth getting a session to chat with a coach/someone who knows stuff about this to get some insights on tapering 'phenotypes' as it were
3 - got my first black toenail! toes just don't get on with either the  Adidas evo sl or the adios pro 4,  which is sad since i really like running in both of those shoes. think it's especially if there's a downhill, maybe? don't think sizing up will help, since the next size up will just be too big overall
4 - walked about an hour to the venue and then about a 90 min walk after. wish the journey to the venue were a little shorter. no chance to really warm up too since we had to be in the pen like 30-40 mins before the start...maybe that would have helped with the crappy leg feeling. the starting 3k were mostly uphill so deliberately took those ks a bit slower, which maybe helped with warming into the race.
5 - half is a fun distance! next half is just over 5 months away. time to 'modifed NSM' my way to another PB there. would be sick to average <4:00/k for that, which is basically <1:24. Seems doable!
6 - been saying this for a while, but maybe time to finally commit to a little cut. am averaging 73-74kg and probably ~15% bodyfat. Not super lean. If I keep carbs up high around my runs, which is pretty easy to do, I should be able to drop a few kg before it's time to 'peak' for the next half without much fuss.