Week of 11-19-2012: 23 miles, 2000' climb (last easy week)

Monday: Off
Tuesday: 7 miles.  2 miles in 12:15, straight into 5000 on track in 17:33 (not a race effort, but a good workout), 2 mile cooldown.
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: 9 miles, 3 mile warmup, South Davis Thanksgiving Day Races 5k in 17:29 (150' gain, 130' loss), 3rd place, 3 mile cooldown.  Meh, didn't feel like a super tough effort, but I had a really hard time pushing myself into the top gear.  I was close to 2nd and should've been able to catch him (I was closing in the 2nd half), but just had a hard time really pushing it.  Still, 17:29 isn't atrocious in the off-season on a course that was all uphill in the 2nd half.  Doing a good short workout on the track 2 days before the race this time was much better than 1 day before the last time.  Legs felt snappy and sharp and my difficulty in really pushing hard was mostly a result of trying to race on 4 1/2 hours of sleep (I couldn't get to bed early the night before and I'm used to 8 hours+).  All in all, this is another race with an equivalent of just under 17 flat with the same effort on flat at sea level.  I would hope I'd be worth slightly faster, but for not really being in shape, this is acceptable, at least for now.
Friday: Off
Saturday: Off
Sunday: 7 miles, 2000' gain.  Sessions Mountain (trail on north side of parking lot) with Holly, up a bit past first false peak and back, just a little under an hour.

Totals: 25 miles, 2000' gain.  Last easy week prior to marathon training.  This week was really kind of irrelevant.  I felt like resting up so I did.  I got up to 78 miles with a day nearly off a few weeks ago, so I know I'm ready for hard training with reasonably high mileage, so now that I'm well rested, I'm starting into a cycle of 14 weeks of very high level training for the Phoenix Marathon.

Music:
Modern heavy crap that I race to, because I sometimes listen to terrible music and also because I'm the kind of douche that always races with headphones on: