Journey to Kona Day 139: Ironman Run Training at its Best!

I woke up this morning and felt pretty much like I did after yesterdays bike ride.  I still felt fatigued, my legs were dead, but there was no soreness.  Perfect ironman run training!  So, I just got out of bed, and ran my very hilly 11.2 mile loop.  The first six miles are a net uphill, and I just ran comfortably, no attention to pace, and it was definitely slow!  I ran the entire time, never walked, but was probably running at nearly a 12 minute/mile pace.  Again, it was a lot of climbing, so that's not too bad.  Also, I never felt stressed, my breathing was fine and my legs actually felt fine, albeit somewhat dead.  When I got to the end of the sixth mile, I knew that the majority of the run back home was downhill, so I decided to increase my effort.  With that said, even my steep downhill mile near the end of my run was done at a pedestrian eight and a half minutes.  Still, by the time I ran up the last steep kicker to my house, my average pace for my 11.2 mile run was 10:45.  For a loop with 850 feet of climbing, on very tired legs, I'm pretty darn happy!

Two weeks since my Ironman in Boulder, and I just completed a near 14 hour training week with some very solid training over the last three days.  Got in some swim intensity, essentially ran a 5K at 5K effort, did one of my hardest bike rides in recent memory, and did a two hour hilly run.  Part of the neat thing about this type of training is that I'm really not sore.  This actually makes sense, especially with a run like the one I did today.  Being able to run a downhill mile only at 8:30 pace limits the damage that I can do to my legs on the downhill.  Similarly, my 5 hour marathon at Ironman Boulder two weeks ago limited the amount of damage that I could do to my legs as well.  It's an interesting corollary to ironman/endurance training.

I've got five weeks to go before I do the Santa Rosa 70.3.  That means that I have 3-4 weeks of 70.3-specific training that I can do before that race.  Which is fine for Kona as well.  I'm envisioning more long bike rides, long runs and long swims.  After all, it's Ironman!