CHANGING TRENDS

More rain.

More miles on the trails.

12 miles to be “exact”.

I’m trying to add in a mid-week medium-long run. That’s something that I feel really helped me prior to Grandma’s but was sorely missing from my summer training program. Ideally, I’d like to be able to run 14-15 miles for these, but when your long run is only 15 miles, 12 miles seems like a good start.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with John Naslund about 6 weeks ago. It was the day before the City of Lakes 25K and we met up for a short run. We were talking about race results over the years and how the same people seem to beat him over the years. It doesn’t matter if he was 30, 40 or 50 – the same people (for the most part) beat him year after year.

I imagine that’s true for most runners, especially if they’ve been at it for a long time. I’m sure it’s true for me. Then I started thinking, “Can I change this trend, and if so, how?” For me, I think it gets back to the rededication post I had a week ago. It has to be about bumping my mileage during my base-building phase. I simply can’t believe I’ve reached my peak performance on only 60 mpw. Sure there have been weeks of higher mileage, but when you average it out for the year, I’m really only a 60 mpw runner – at best.

So I thought I’d give a brief recap of my last attempt at high mileage which took place at the end of 2005 and into early 2006.

Nov 246 miles with weeks between 35 and 78 miles
Dec 316 miles with weeks between 54 and 80 miles
Jan 364 miles with weeks between 50 and 97 miles
Feb 326 miles with weeks between 64 and 100 miles (1:24:45 half)
Mar 365 miles with weeks between 74 and 92 miles (29:15 8K)

In April I had weeks of 69 and 87 along with a 1:17:57 20K, which was a pace faster than I was able to run for 10K just 6 months prior.

A week after that 20K I was on the sidelines with a calf injury. After further review I attributed that injury to being too aggressive on the downhill portion of my hill workouts. Then last night I was re-reading Daws’ Running Your Best – the same book I read two years ago. Daws was big on “smooth transitions” into different types of training. You don’t go from low mileage to high mileage right away. You don’t jump from slow running to speed workouts. You don’t go from running on the flats to running hills.

Regarding that last sentence, he said you need to include hilly runs during your base training, prior to running hill workouts. I thought about that this morning as I was trudging up a hill in Hyland Park and a light bulb went off in my head. In 2005/2006 I did about 90% of my base training on the pancake flat railroad beds in the area. While that terrain was great for adding miles, it did nothing to prepare me for the upcoming hill phase. So while running downhill too hard probably wasn’t the best idea, running on mostly flat surfaces was even worse.

I guess that’s the long way of saying that I think I’ll be ready for the hills this time around. However, I don’t know how my weekly mileage will fare if I run in Hyland Park 5 days a week. I guess I’ll find out.

Quote of the day;

“Hills: You entered a marathon with hills? You idiot.” – Don Kardong