EARLY STAGES

The nice thing about keeping a blog is you can zip back to last year and see exactly what you were doing. Being in the early stages of base-building, I could just about copy and paste last year’s post and call it November 7, 2006.

Where am I at and/or where am I going?

This is my second week "back". Last week I ran 53 miles and this week I'm shooting for 56-60 miles. I'm trying to follow Daws' advice of keeping my daily efforts the same. To do that I keep my mileage in a narrow range, like 7-9 miles per day and keep the effort easy to moderate. Again, the idea is to get comfortable with the mileage before adding in hard/easy days and long runs.

Yesterday I ran 9 miles around 8:20 pace. I took my 2-mile splits during the last 8 miles just to see what was happening. It turns out I start out really slow, 8:40 pace for the first 2 miles. Then it looks like I drop to 8:20 pace, then 8:00 pace before finishing at 8:15 pace. What does it all mean? I don't know; it just takes up space in a blog entry. Actually it makes me think I need more "no watch" runs at this point in my training.

Today I ran 8 miles. As I mentioned last week, I decided to add some hills a couple times during the work-week. Today I added 4 "hills" at the end of my run. I'm almost ashamed to call them hills, but they're the best I've found for my current running situation.

The first 7 days of November last year, I ran 8, 7, 9, 6, 8, 8 and 9 for a total of 55 miles. This year I’ve run 7, 7, 10, 7, 8, 8 and 8 for a total of 55 miles. Today’s 8 miler was the same as yesterday, except it was 2 minutes faster – just under 8:00 pace.

Quote of the day;

“If you can stick to the training throughout the many long years, then willpower is no longer a problem. It’s raining? That doesn’t matter. I am tired? That’s besides the point. It’s simply that I have to.” – Emil Zatopek