Tuesday afternoon
5.57 mi / 8.96 km
77 F / 25 C
Just before leaving my office, I did some oblique sit-ups on the incline bench I brought to my office, and some dynamic stretching with ankle weights, mostly standing leg swings--front-to-back & side-to-side. These are great for stretching out the glutes and hip flexors.
From my office I ran 1.7 miles tempo pace to Hendon Hill, then ran up and over it and back again for about two miles' worth, then ran a bunch of 100-meter lengths on the Murray JHS's soccer/football field, approaching a sprint on a few of those, most other times running between 6 and 7 mm pace. Then ran home up going up the steepest hill in the neighborhood, a real lung burner. Overall, medium effort, good workout, need to do that sort of thing once a week I think. I've been running at a purely aerobic pace a little bit too much lately.
And I really like the last four day's sequence of workouts: long run, then chest & bi's st, then run commute and lower body st, then tempo, hills, and intervals run. After a long run (sat), the best thing is a st workout (sun) that has nothing to do with the lower body, so the legs have time to recover. Then if you do two consecutive st workouts, it's best that the second one (mon) has nothing to do with the body area of the first one. Then the tempo, hills, and interval run (tues) seems to help train for running purposes the same muscles and we're just activated in the prior day's lower body st workout.
Scratch might find this article on interval training interesting:
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/02/interval-training-why-its-misunderstood.html
Ties into his suggestion about doing strides in the middle of a run. I think I might try something along these lines on tomorrow's mezzo run.
Wednesday morning, one-mile run-commute.
When I woke up, my left foot was still slightly achy, so I blew off the planned mezzo run and just came straight to the office. I've long noticed that my left foot lands a little flatter, almost heel-striking, than my right foot, and makes a little noise while doing it, whereas my right foot is pretty silent. Since I tend to feel more strain, tofp, and aches on my left side, I reasoned that it might be due to the difference in foot landing, so I tried to make my left foot land more like my right foot on this morning's commute. I've manipulated the left foot landing before, but have never practiced it consistently. It think I'll try to be a bit more attentive to my left foot landing and see if it doesn't help alleviate the mild achiness in there. Hopefully it'll be gone in time for this Saturday's long run.
Funny, last week I wasn't getting into my run-commutes, but this week I'm really enjoying my little jaunts to the office, although I still get the urge to run farther once I've warmed up.