Running on Empty

“Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”

–George S. Patton, U.S. Army General, 1912 Olympian

Yesterday I completed the GEICO Race for Freedom 10K at Lake Hefner Park.   My goal was to finish without stopping at whatever was a comfortable pace. I completed the run without a problem although I had some concerns leading up to the race.  I evidently brused a tendon on my foot and was having trouble running on it around week 5 of the schedule.

To keep pressure off the foot I switched to biking both at home and at the gym.  Basically I took my running schedule, did the workout on my bike, but tripled the distance.  If I worked at a pace that kept my heart rate around the same as my jogging heart rate; the bike work would take about the same time as if I had run it.

For the 5K to 10K race I switched to a 7 week schedule.  I figured I had already gotten to mile 4 by the end of my 5K workout and 7 weeks seemed like plenty of time to 6.2 miles.  Additionally I included a couple hill workouts on my longer runs.  This helped improve my performance but ultimately didn’t matter much for the 10K which was a flat course.

Here is my training schedule for the 10K:

The last two events have gone so well that I am thinking about doing a half marathon in about 10 weeks. It would be a much faster progression that I have attempted so far; but my thinking is that I am better off challenging myself.  The other option is spending 4-5 weeks working towards a 15K that I can probably do already.

What is more problematic is that the biking has gotten me thinking about a triathlon.