February Blues

I'm not usually one to complain (much) or get bothered by the winter, being a northern New Brunswicker by birth, but this 'winter' is starting to get to me. We easily got 12+ inches (or 30+cm) of snow last weekend resulting in closures of most businesses in the area. It took Jo and I about 2-3 hours to dig out.
This is our backyard looking in through a 4 foot fence. See how the drift is higher than the fence on the right!
The winter has been a pain but at least it hasn't affected my running. Here are my February blues runs nicely plotted by Buckeye Outdoors where I've been logging my runs and participating in challenges such as running 2009 miles in 2009. The Feb. total is 176 miles in 20 runs (with 8 rest days) in 25hr and 15 min.

I'm still on track with the Pfitzinger plan with the past week ending with a total of 51 miles in 5 runs. Despite falling back to an easier (Plan B) plan of 55 miles per week or less, I've found this plan more challenging than expected. It has more rest days than I'm used to but the other days more than make up for it, with fairly strong contrast between days.

The Pushup Challenge has fallen off the radar screen lately with nada a faceplant in about 2 weeks now. I'm not sure if I got bored with the plateau and lack of progress or it was just other pressures on my time and energy lately.

Weekly run down:
Sunday - 17 miles around Boyden with Andrew at a relaxed 8:24 pace

Monday - rest and shovel out

Tues - recovery 5 miles with heavy legs (8:38 pace)

Weds - 12 miles medium long run which went like a dream. Despite feeling a bit off and not wanting to get out the door, once I got started things just fell in place and the nice gentle pace felt effortless. Average 8:28 pace and heartrate 137.

Thurs - rest day

Friday - 11 miles with 6 at 1/2 marthon pace (which I read it as a hard/tempo effort). One of those tough workouts that you look forward to with a sense of fear and dread. You get very little sympathy from non-runners on this one. Their opinion is simply 'why would you want to put yourself through such misery anyway?' Put myself though it I did, with a 4 mile warmup and then 6 miles at my new harder pace which translated only to 730-750 mile pace. For some reason the legs just wouldn't co-operate and my heartrate stayed stubbornly low at 140-150 (80-90% of max). Final result was a sucked out runner laid out on the couch for the evening. Such is the price of maintenance/improvement with the goal now only 7 weeks away.

Sat - 5 miles very very easy at 8:48 pace. The legs were grumpy at 1st but gradually accepted the slow gentle pace. More strange weather with a drop in temperature and approaching series of storms predicted for most of next week.

That's it for the week. Still busy but at least still on track and hoping to cling on for a few more weeks to get the requisite fitness to put on a decent show for Boston. Have a nice week all!