Trashy tacos mixed with speedwork

Speedwork. Scary, fun, amazing, tough, great, and daunting.

I rarely do any official, regimented speedwork when I am not raring up for a race.  Some of my runs are naturally tempo or full of farleks, but I don't ever do mile repeats if I don't have a race on the horizon.

Why?

Mostly because I have an enormous fear of failure (big surprise) and like to keep my off-training running stress-free and without limits.  It's easier to run just to run.  After all these years of running, I have a good sense of what 'normal' running is for me.  Some days I run fast as hell because it feels so good to have a lung-searing session and other times I just bop along like the big goober that I am.

But now that marathon training is in order again, it's time to ramp up this 'official' business and try to stick to the plan.  I've (smartly) rearranged my running days this week to accommodate work and illness so today ended up being the speedwork day.

I would have gone in the late morning, but we ended up taking 2 of the 3 furkids to the vet for their check-ups/vaccinations.  That was fun....  After we were finished, Adam wanted to get lunch and against better judgement, we got a giant box of tacos from Taco Bell.  Doritos Locos are so trashy, but I think we all know that my food tastes run the gamut from foie gras to french fries.  Fast forward an hour and a half and I decide that the Falcons are doing great (20-0) and that I wouldn't miss much while I did my run.

It wasn't too bad.  I felt a little queasy at the end of the 3rd repeat, but I was pushing myself so I'm not sure that it was taco-related.  I did a mile warm-up, 3x1600 with 800m jogs in between, and finished with a mile cool down.  My goal was to do the 1600s in 7:38 and I hit them at 7:20, 7:04, and 7:09.  Woot!  I might have whittled those down to sub 7s if it was cooler (70s with 80% humidity in January, ugghhh!!!) and I ran pre-tacos.

This week I have a couple of easy runs, a tempo, and a 14-miler.  I'm not worried about the 14-miler since my base mileage has been great in the past few months and I ran a 16-miler a few weeks ago without issue.  It's the 18+ long runs that start to make me feel like, whoa, I AM marathon training. 
No hills for me this week, but I did get 2 more sessions of strength training in even though I felt like poo for 4 days.  And I stuck to my plan of not running my long run all kamikaze-like.  I'll take 2 out of 3 goals accomplished this week.T