Week 8: Vacation + Training

Week 8 of my Chicago training fell smack dab into the middle of a jam-packed family vacation in Maine.  My coach had me scheduled with a full plate and I did okay with it.  I say okay because I did not hit all my scheduled workouts, but I did get all of my quality workouts in.

Monday is typically my rest day, but since I was travelling Tuesday, I had 75 minutes easy (8:45-9:00 pace) on tap.  Unfortunately, I was tired, a wee bit hungover from drinking wine with my good friends for my 39th birthday the night before and my hip was sore.  So I bagged it after 23 minutes and roughly 2.5 miles.  Oops.

Tuesday was a travel day and scheduled rest day.  I knew we'd get into Maine just after noon, but I also knew that with meeting up with family, etc., a run was probably out of the question (I was thinking about running to make up for time missed Monday).  Nope - no time, no run.  I did eat two delicious lobsters while hanging out ocean side with family though.  :)

Fortunately I did a little better training-wise on Wednesday.  We stayed in Cape Elizabeth and I ran to the local high school track to do my intervals.  I had 8 x 600 meters at 7:08 pace; 400 meter recoveries.  I nailed my intervals and ended up with 10.75 miles.  Once I finished up, we grabbed lunch and hit the road to Bar Harbor!

At the summit of the Beehive

Thursday was a fail.  My entire family headed to Acadia National Park and the plan was for me to run an hour while they hiked, then we'd meet up and continue on.  However, when we got to the visitor's center, we were told that if we wanted to do the popular Beehive Hike (rather intense hike up the face of a mountain), we'd better get over there quick before it got too congested.  So we hiked the Beehive - which was awesome - then headed to Bowl Lake for a dip, climbed Gorham Mountain and checked out Thunder Hole.  We ended up hiking for more than 4 hours.  It was awesome, but I was in no shape to run after that.  We were also starving too!  So we headed into Bar Harbor for some good eats instead.

Friday I woke up early to make sure I could get my second tempo interval workout done.  The workout was 6 x .5 mile repeats @ 7:08 pace with .25 recoveries.  I headed back to Acadia and hit the famous Carriage Roads.  It was beautiful, but very hilly and I forgot to bring water with me.  So it was admittedly a bit of a suffer fest, but I got them done and hit a total of 8.4 miles.  After I finished up, we hit the road again to Greenville, Maine and the Moosehead Lake area.  Friday evening, we went on a very successful moose safari!

Moosehead Lake

Saturday was my son's birthday.  While the boys got situated and had a light breakfast, I ran from our motor inn to downtown Greenville.  It was absolutely beautiful, but WICKED hilly.  Yikes, it was hot and humid too.  It was a great run, however, and nice to get in about 7 miles before another long road trip back to the Portland area.

Sunday I was scheduled for 2.5 hours, so I ran from Cape Elizabeth to Portland.  It wasn't too crazy hot, but it was about 95% humidity and ridiculously hilly.  Add in the accumulation of crappy sleep all week and admittedly bad fueling on Saturday (PSA: a birthday donut, 2 lobsters, ice cream and 2 glasses of wine do not equal good long run fueling).  So I was hurting.  It didn't help that my Garmin completely died after about 14 miles.  But, with my out and back, I knew I was right around 16.6 miles and what had to be 2:30 or close to it.

Bonus:  Even though my long run was a bit of a suffer fest, I did have a very cool sighting.  As I was running back toward the Casco Bay bridge and saw Bill Rogers (aka Boston Billy).  I was sure of it!  He had a Beach to Beacon race shirt on and I wondered if he had come up for the weekend to run the race.  Sure enough, I found out the next morning from my sister-in-law that he had come up to run it with Joan Benoit Samuelson.  Too bad I didn't see her too!

I ended up with just over 45 miles.  I was about an hour and 45 minutes short of my schedule, but I did get in 2 tempo interval workouts and a long run, so I'll take it.

Back to regularly scheduled training this week.  :)