HIGH PRAISE

It's been 4 days since my last post, so this will mainly be a boring training update.

I’ve run over 50 miles on some great trails since that last post. Friday morning I got in 11 miles before work. I finally decided to get off the paved trails near my office and hit the dirt/wood chip trails. The black flies seemed to have settled down and a little bug spray is enough to get me through the run.

During my feeble attempts to get a new training group started, I was invited to join a group that meets every Saturday morning at various spots throughout the metro area. This week they happened to be meeting a mile from my house, so I couldn’t pass it up. Some of these guys were driving 30-40 miles to get to, as they put it, “the best trails in the metro area.” Given that these trails are in my backyard, it’s cool to hear such high praise.

These guys are all great runners too. Every year they are near the top of their age-groups for the Runner of the Year rankings. Even though they are all older than 45, they were still kicking my ass all over the trail. But that’s alright. I managed to run a total of 19 miles, which is my longest training run so far this time around. This run gave me 81 miles for the week.

It’s probably no surprise that something is bothering me, given how quickly I’ve ramped up my mileage. My right knee has been feeling a little sore for about a week now. So that, combined with having family in town for the weekend, I decided to take Sunday off.

Yesterday I took the day off of work and went swimming with the girls. Prior to that, I got in 10 miles of progressively faster running. I ran 3 times Jensen Lake, which is about 2.2 mile around in 16:22, 15:53 and 15:05. My legs really bounced back from the day off and felt nice and springy.

That springy feeling carried over to today’s 11 mile trail run too. While I didn’t run as hard as yesterday, I did run stronger than normal. I figure I might as well roll with it while it’s there. Tomorrow will probably be another story.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to approach my Chicago training. Should I try to build up to 100 mpw again and really go for it? Should I not worry about mileage and focus on key workouts instead? Should I do whatever it takes to stay healthy (whatever that means)? Of course I’d like to “go for it” but having missed my last marathon due to an injury, I also want to make it to the starting line.

I emailed my thoughts to Evan last week and I thought I’d get a two sentence response. Instead, I got a response that basically turned into this post for him.

I’ve only known Evan for a short time, but I respect his opinions on training. I don’t think I’ve ever run with someone who has such a strong sense of what certain training stimuli, whether it’s mileage or specific workouts, etc. will do for his fitness.

With all that said, I’ve decided to skip my Tuesday night group track workouts for a few weeks. Instead, I’ll focus on getting around 80 mpw on singles with some strong efforts, recovery days and long runs mixed in.

Quote of the day;

“The only wall Benoit ever hit was the outfield fence with a double in the gap at the Bowdoin alumni day softball game.” – Amby Burfoot, on Joan Benoit Samuelson