1 down, 13 to go!

The first week of my outseason plan is complete.  I did fairly well hitting my workouts this week, but I did tweak the run workouts a bit for a few reasons.  As I recover from this stress fracture and ease into a regular run volume, I do want to ensure I do not tweak anything from pushing too hard on run intervals.  Thus, I did not do a typical EN run test this week.  I made my run test a tempo run as a mile warm up, then 3.1 miles with my HR at a Z3.  Speed is certainly not where it was at this point last year, but I have accepted that this will be a gradual build after a significant injury.  

That all being said-I was able to get out to Waterfall Glen this morning for my first loop of 2014.  I met Katie Mertz out there for a fun, easy paced loop-I know I shouldn't have busted out 10 miles quite yet, but I really wanted to get back out there and of course, have an opportunity to chat with Katie :) But what I thought was going to be an easy jog, turned into quite a challenging run. The conditions at WFG were pretty awful.  There was a good 5 inches of fresh snow, atop of several inches of packed down snow, with a wonderful layer of ice that was far from smooth.  Every step turned into sliding around on the trail, which made keeping any kind of a steady pace extremely difficult.  We couldn't even lift our feet above the snow-I was literally shuffling through the snow with every step.  But we finished-slow and steady-and had a great time doing it!  I was happiest that even though every step was uneven, and my feet were shifting awkwardly with every step-I had NO pain in my heel whatsoever!  It took me about 2 hours to thaw out after this morning's snowy run :)

The bike this week went as expected.  The first week back on the bike is always challenging for me, because it is hard to see watts so much lower than I ended the season with, but does inspire me to get to work and see where I can be at the end of this outseason.  On Thursday I has a VO2 workout that was sick.  Last year, the first VO2 workout of the OS was 6x 30s/30s off Zone 5-This year's first VO2 workout was 6x 1.5'/1.5' Off...Which is a considerable difference from 30/30s!  But I was able to hit my numbers-just felt exhausted the rest of the day!

Running everyday is still going strong as well-couldn't be happier that the 10 miler this morning was pain free!  Ready to ride again tomorrow and get a great start on week 2!