Week 10 was my highest volume week to date and I learned some things I should have noticed about my schedule and modified it for this week. Monday following this week I was feeling a bit off. My running is slowing and i'm not happy about the pain in my low back. It went away by Tuesday, but these are some of the things that I added that week and I'll suggest what I should have done differently. I ran 62 miles this week, my highest volume for the training period so far. Two weeks prior I ran 60. I added speed work with the fartleks and I added a race at a pace I have not been training for. The race should have been viewed as a priority run and I shold have adjusted the schedule to allow full recover for race day. The purpose of the rece was to gague whether I am on target for a 8:00 marathon. But that being said I should have done one of the following: Eliminate the speed training on Monday; give myself a full day of rest on Friday and therefore cut my total miles for the week by 6miles; Skip running in the snow on Sunday (the day after a race) and run on a treadmill instead at 6 miles instead of 10: and should have skipped the indoor bike training for the week.
I mention all of this because there were too many new variables to that week. I know I could have raced better and would not have felt any back pain ( note I've never experiend low back pain from running) the day following the race if i had modified the training to have only 2 hard training days, 3 really easy days, and only one moderate day. Instead I had 3 hard, two moderate, and 1 easy. The good news is that as i'm writing this on Tuesday following another fartlek run and my back pain is gone, but i'm still running about 10-20% slower than I would like.