Flat.

One of the things we learned in RRCA Certification is that you should rotate between hard and easy through the week.  Long runs are hard, just by sheer length.  Easy runs should be both shorter and not a whole lot faster.  This gives your body a chance to heal from the muscle damage done on the harder runs so that your body gets stronger.

Notice above that most of my runs (with the exception of the blue long run) fall within a very small window.  They were all between 4.5 and 5.5 for the last week+.  And you can’t tell here, but several were run faster than recommended, especially the one in pink.

I have plenty of excuses – my attempt at a long run last week ended with a fast run to the bathroom and I never got a chance to try again.  My “short recovery run” had to be fit into Jones’ cello lesson, so I ran it at about a 9:11 pace (way too fast for recovery!)  My interval run was longer than it should have been because I was trying to make up some miles.  Yada yada yada.

My legs are tired of my excuses.  Ok, really, my legs are just tired.  (Didn’t help that one of the days where I didn’t run I was on my feet for 7 hours).  I’m supposed to run today, but I have a bit of a mutiny on my hands.  My legs are on strike.  I feel like my feet are glued to the floor.  I’m pretty sure they are saying “Give us a break, follow a real plan (with true recovery), or we are going to break.”  What remains to be seen is whether I listen or not.

On a totally unrelated note, last night we went to a Strong Beer tasting event.  The lowest alcohol beer I drank was 8.5%!  In the midst of the drinking, I thought it was a good idea to download instagram and start tweeting.  May not have been my best idea ever LOL, but I’m MCMmama on instagram.  I still haven’t figured out the “following” thing on that.

Let’s not talk about whether last night’s events are playing a role in my inability to run today.