I’m De-bonking.

Taking a cue from @CalebMasland blog post over at http://bit.ly/14Y9WO, I did a variation of the speed post fatigue workout.

The plan was four easy miles around a 7:20 pace, then a 5K, hopefully under 20 minutes. What a fantastic, soul-crushing (in a good way), leg-numbing workout. The first four miles are just candy. Nice steady pace, got a good sweat going, salivating about just killing the 5K at the end. Then the first fast mile is like being let off a leash, it’s go time! Then just at the tail end of the first mile you realize you have to maintain this pace for the next 2+ miles if you wanna break 20:00. You suffer through the next mile, hoping you calculated your route to be long enough so you don’t have to run loops through the neighborhood. Then the last mile is go time again and it’s like there are wings under your feet, then (and this is not advisable) you crash during the last .11 miles because your @$$ is not yet de-bonked.

I’m happy to say that I did end up breaking 20:00 (19:57 to be exact) in the 5K part and even though I crashed over the “finish line”, I can’t wait to do this run again and other of Caleb’s exercises

Side note: Seems I can write forever about my runs, but I can barely maintain one post a month on my work blog. Odd…

Total of 7.11 miles at 6:56 pace.

Splits were:
7:19
7:25
7:15
7:22
6:25
6:32
6:26
0:34 (.11 miles at 5:08 pace)

>So, I’ve decided that I’m not going to do the KC Marathon.  I really wanted to qualify for the Boston Marathon, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to the training I’d need to hit the 3:10 mark for BQ.  I still might do the 1/2 marathon, but I dunno.  There is a whole different blog post why I really don’t like doing races that dips deep into the dark corners of my psyche (and 7th grade track repressed memories).
So, for now, I’m going to focus on being a fast short to medium distance runner.  Anything under 5 miles, I know how to pace myself to finish at a good time and have plenty of gas left to knock out a low 6 minute mile.  Anything more than 5, and I’m unsure where to hold up, when to speed up, etc.
Even though I’m not training for anything, I still need some form of structure otherwise I’ll just keep doing my favorite distance of 4 miles over and over.
My plan is to push myself out of my comfort zone and see what I can come up with.  I want to alternate my short and medium runs and have them add up to 10 miles.  So if I do 3 miles today, my next run will be 7 miles.  If I do a 9 miler, I can “reward” myself with a 1 mile run, etc.
I’m also setting a pace goals for myself, so I have a PR to shoot for every run:

I’d like to get four runs in a week, which would give me about 20 miles a week.  If I can stick to this plan for the rest of the year, and sprinkle in a couple of long runs, I’ll be able to get over 850 miles for 2009.  I’d be happy with that considering we had a baby last December, bought a house in June and other news that I can’t quite talk about yet.
I’d love to hear from other runners how they run when they are not training for anything.