PFITZ'S PLAN

Just in case this got lost in the comments, I wanted to thank “gh” for finding the link to Pfitz’s plan. I thought his 55 mpw plan was online, but it looks like it’s his 70 mpw plan. I also wanted to make it clear that I didn’t think it’d be a piece of cake for someone running 40 mpw to jump into this plan. It’s doable, but it will require some work. I just wanted to make sure that people are aware that his plan doesn’t call for 18 straight weeks at 55 miles.

I did manage an easy 5 miles over lunch today. This evening I met my training group, as well as the Macalester College men’s team, for a session of stairs. After warming up we ran for 15 minutes on the tower stairs and then ran 15 minutes on the Wabasha Bridge stairs. We were supposed to run another 15-minute set on the Science Museum stairs, but they were blocked off (darn), so we ran a couple of hills. I don’t know why, but I like hills a lot more than stairs. Maybe it’s because you can get into more of a rhythm and you can lift your feet as little as you’d like on a hill. I definitely felt more of a burn on the stairs.

Afterwards we had a pizza party at “The Pit,” which is a room in St. Paul that our coach recently rented. It’ll mainly be for spinning sessions, a place to meet before workouts and wild, crazy drunken parties – at the end of the season, of course.

On the training side of things, I’m getting my miles in. All those places that tend to hurt on runners (knees, Achilles, plantar, ITB, etc) are feeling fine. My main concern is getting enough rest. The one thing that really screws things up is these Tuesday night runs. For a guy that runs the majority of his mileage in the morning, these workouts really make getting up on Wednesdays tough. The Tuesday night runs are also probably the most productive from a training standpoint, so I don’t want to give them up.

On the mental side, I’ve just been practicing my relaxation before bed each night. One of the books says it takes 21 days for it to “kick in.” That’ll be right around my next race. If the relaxation drills don’t put me to sleep I try to visualize me running this race. I was thinking the other day; when I’m doing my relaxation exercises, I think about running, but when I’m running, I’m thinking about relaxing.

Quote of the day:
“There was not a lot to do, and sitting around waiting for your red blood cells to multiply is not the most fascinating of pastimes.” Brendan Foster on summer altitude training at St. Moritz, Switzerland