INDECISION

If you read my blog regularly you’re probably going to be overwhelmed with Daws and Lydiard references for awhile. I’ve been reading Daws’ Running Your Best: The Committed Runner’s Guide to Training and Racing. I’m a big highlighter guy. I like to read with a highlighter to mark the key things on each page so I can go back and easily find the key points. The problem with doing that with this book is that half of the book ends up highlighted. Seriously, this book is 20 years old, but it’s one of the best, if not THE best I’ve read on training. It’s not super scientific like Daniels’ Running Formula, but Daws writes in such a way that everything seems very logical. He’s got me excited to start training for next season, even though I’m still in the middle of this season.

One of the things Daws keeps mentioning is making smooth transitions from one phase of training to the next. When I looked at my log book last night, I noticed I did this with my anaerobic workouts last year. I was doing 80-100 meter strides through out the year. Then a few weeks before I was going to be doing harder 400s and 800s, I started doing 200 meter pickups for a week or two, then 300 meter pickups for a week or two. The idea being that I didn’t go from 0 to 800s in one workout.

Even though I’ve done one 800 workout and numerous mile repeats, I thought it’d be a good idea to do some 200-300 meter pickups today. Again these would help prepare me for future 400s and 800s. In addition, they’d be “easy” enough to not wipe me out for a 5k this Sunday.

Well right at the last second (just as I was finishing my warm-up) I had a moment of indecision and decided just to do an up-tempo run. My reasoning was that I could get in an up-tempo run and a shorter speed workout on consecutive days, rest on Saturday and race on Sunday. I figured the up-tempo run would require more time to recover, so I did that first. I ended up warming up 20 minutes, running up-tempo (marathon pace or faster) for 30 minutes and cooling down for 10 minutes.