10-4 update...

Well,
I had a decent week in as far as mileage goes.
Still a bit tired due to the sickness thing but feeling better. Thankfully the temps have been dropping in Central Kentucky giving me hope for the upcoming ultras.
Monday night I was able to crank out 16 miles in 2.5 hours so I was pretty happy about that. My goal is to always run a half in under two hours and then go from there, on the road at least.
Finally started to feel like I had some energy in my legs and that I could go the distance.
Rested at work on Tuesday and wasn't able to get out on Wednesday due to family business. Thursday wasn't looking too optimistic either until I made myself go out the door at 8:30. Wound up being a beautiful evening in the 40's with almost no moon and lots of stars. Ran some pretty good hills before retreating to the quiet and no cars of a local park loop. Again was able to get in almost sixteen miles and still feel pretty good. Purposely ran the first couple of hours without added gel or fluids to prepare myself for that hungry feeling later on in the race.

As far as pace I read an interesting article that was linked from the Furnace 508 website the other day. The article talked about the misnomer associated with LSD, being the term for Long Slow Distance. The authors theory was that training (in his case cycling) at a very slow speed just trains your body to run very slowly. Instead, the author suggested looking at the term in terms of Long Steady Distance, or training at a pace that while below race pace is still making a steady effort.

That is kind of what I was experimenting with this past week in training and have found it to be pretty encouraging. Sometimes all those miles at a slow pace can just be discouraging. It made me feel pretty good to know that I could hit the road throughout the week with any kind of major preparation and run a half marathon close to my PR. After that distance which is pretty familiar I feel alot better about backing off the pace and enjoying the miles. By mixing up speed, terrain etc. I feel like my body is alot less likely to develop repetitive type injuries and my mind stays more alert. Thursday night I also ran with a mp3 player for the first time in years and found it pretty relaxing. I never like wearing headphones during the day when I have to deal with more cars etc. but to run at night in park I found it made the time go by much faster.

Next post, my recent 10-k experience.