Wednesday, March 22, 2006

8 MEASLY SECONDS

All those cold, dark mornings - waking up before 5 AM to get in mile-after-mile, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month - for what? 8 measly seconds per mile faster than my time from last year.

And do you know what? I’ll take it. 8 measly seconds per mile faster has me excited.

I’m not sure how do you do a cost-benefit analysis that includes the euphoria after a good race, the good-spirited emails the following week, the anticipation of what the season might bring, etc?

But I do know that all that time spent training was worth it.

Just based on those 29 minutes and 15 seconds, I can safely say this “experiment” has been a success.

As you can imagine, it was hard for me to control myself during this morning’s run. But I had to. The way my schedule works, Mondays and Wednesdays must be easy recovery days. Today that meant running 10 miles at about 8:15 pace, even though I wanted to open up the pace a little. However, with a hill workout tomorrow, a run with Scott on Friday, hills with my training group on Saturday and a long run Sunday, I needed to hold back.

One of the nice things about the hill phase is I get to cut my mileage back a little. So rather than shooting for 90-100 miles, I’ll try to get in 80-85 miles. I figure the best way to do this is to just eliminate my doubles. It also means that I’ll have to get back into the habit of getting up at 4:40 every day.

Quote of the day:

“The introduction of resistance in form of sand and hill is too important to be ignored.” Percy Cerutty

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3 comments:

  1. Mike3/24/2006 2:16 AM

    I like how you are going to "cut my mileage back" to 80-85...solid mileage there Zeke!
    4:40am wake-ups? That sounds BRUTAL

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  2. Duncan Larkin3/24/2006 8:21 AM

    I'm late on my comments...nice race buddy. You are making headway and it's all due to the discipline you've been following as well as proper adherence to the basics. I think the mental imagery techniques count as well. Keep it up. Stay strong. Grandmas...PR...file it in your head...PR....let's go...make your hard workouts hurt and your recoveries boring...you've got traction. Dig in.

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  3. Chad3/24/2006 12:24 PM

    Susan, after all the times you've made me smile, I'm glad I can return the favor.

    Mike, I'd rather get up at 4:40 and just run once a day, rather than sleep in till 5:15 and have to run in the evening as well.

    Thanks Duncan. You're right, I need to get out of the mindset of "just miles" and move towards "hard/easy" and making workouts count.

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