BUILDING STRENGTH

One of the things to come out of my recent email discussion with Derek is that it comes down to building strength. One of his suggestions was to incorporate back-to-back workouts during the week. Looking back at my log from last year I see lots of long runs on Saturday followed by a zero on Sunday. This time around I’m trying to run stronger paced medium long runs on Saturday, followed by long runs on Sunday. Based on how wobbly my legs were during the last 30 minutes of last Sunday’s run, I must be doing something right.

Another slight tweak to my training so far has been to stick with just running once a day. I just did a quick search and I believe the 80 miles I’ve been running in singles is my best ever. Even when I had a few weeks of 90-100 miles, “only” 75ish of those were done in singles. I’m sure it helps with the ideal conditions we’ve had lately. If it’s 20 below, I may end up splitting some of my mileage into multiple workouts just to keep from freezing. Hopefully that’s still two months away.

Right now my plan is to continue building my mileage through Thursday, then I’ll just play it by ear while I’m in NYC. It’s been 3.5 weeks since I cut back, so I’m due pretty soon. And given that I ramped up from 0 to 80 mpw rather quickly, I think I’ll be content to hang out in the 80-mile range for a few weeks and let things soak in.

I’m kind of at that point where I’m in a routine and I know how I’ll feel on certain days of the week. Saturdays are longer and quicker than normal, so I’m a little tired on Sundays – especially at the end. Back-to-back harder runs means that Mondays are the worst. But I don’t worry about pace at all and just run an easy 60-70 minutes, like yesterday’s easy 8 miles. That’s enough of an easy effort to make today’s 10 miles feel really good.

When I heard Bob Dylan sing today’s quote of the day recently, it reminded me of my training; I believe in high mileage, but somehow I end up doing what’s convenient and then I come on here and repent.

Quote of the day;

“You always said people don't do what they believe in, they just do what's most convenient, then they repent.” – Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl