Turning a failed attempt into a succesful training!

I had it all planned out for today, waking up early to do some easy zone 1 warmup (5km) and then some 15 sec strides and sufficient time to recover before doing a 5km tempo block below my lactate threshold at a strong pace of 3:50 - 4:00 range amd finishing with a few kilometers in zone 1 again. Well.. things went a little different today, here is what happened:

The warming up and strides went just as planned (warm up + hardlopen 1 - 3), the real workout “hardlopen 4” was not succesful. I started the run within the range, but crossing a corner the cold and strong headwind overwelmed me. It took me out of my rythm and into my mind back to my Spijkenisse Marathon 2 weeks ago where I blew too much energy on maintaining my pace against the wind. Despite 5km is nowhere near 42km , I was no longer in flow but thinking. I stopped the session and took a breath - realizing that while I could do this physically , my mind had gotten the best of me.

Now I had a few options to consider:

• end the training => go home & relax new attempt soon
• do a retry (considering either do the same route again, or “cheating a little” by picking favorable wind direction
• adjust todays trainingsprogram.

I decided to adjust my trainingsprogram and focus on achieving the intended trainingseffect (speedwork), I refuse to let an unsuccesful training get me down, and I wasn’t going to cut any corners either. Redoing the same attempt after a failed attempt felt out of reach as the wind was still there and I already used some energy. I decided to go for intervals slightly faster than the pace I had in mind. This became sessions of different lenghts (few 200 - 300m , few 400-600m and another 1.3km) in between I did easy pace to recover.

My training today ended with these sessions

Giving me a total of 15 km, with 6km of quality tempo work! So while my original training was not doable today, it was a very productive (and fun session) today!

Happy running!