Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Better Late Than Never

This is what I had typed out for two weeks ago. Sorry for the delay in posting; school becomes all-consuming at the end of the year between graduation and grades.
My training has been going very well lately and I have been running much more than I ever have before. In the past, I have run a random 100 mile week here and there. Over the past month and a half, I have been between 90 and 105 miles for all but one week. Last Tuesday, all of those miles really caught up with me. I went to practice fully intending to run a workout but felt so terrible on the warm-up that I decided to bag my tempo run and do an easy 100 minute run instead. I was very tired on my run, but hoped I would recover by Wednesday. I slogged through a miserable 30 minute run on Wednesday, feeling like complete crap the entire run. After getting home, I decided I needed to take some rest to get my legs back under me. I took three days off, stretching from Thursday to Saturday. Each day I rode my new bike on some errands but did not run a step. On Sunday, I ran 30 minutes and felt fine. I followed that up with 80 minutes on Monday and 100 minutes yesterday, feeling solid on both runs. In looking at my training leading up to my unplanned break, a few things stood out to me that I need to change about my training. First, I need to stop worrying about the pace of my runs. I don't think it is a coincidence that I figured out the mile marks for my runs a couple weeks before getting worn out. Second, I need to really be consistent with running twice a day, five days a week. This will keep me from trying to get in extra miles on my second runs. The third and final thing I need to do pertains to my long run. I need to alternate runs of 150 and 180 minutes, because three hour runs wear me out quite a bit.

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