Ran four miles untimed this morning, just taking it easy and focusing on keeping the pace comfortable and running with good mechanics.
This evening I got a call from Portland State University letting me know that I've been accepted to their MFA program. Pretty friggin' cool.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
3/3/10 - Five miles including striders
Today's run was four miles in 34:52 (last half-mile in 3:19) followed by 6 x 15 second striders and a half-mile cooldown.
Total: five miles.
Total: five miles.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Same thing in less time.
Perhaps foolishly, I've been running the same five mile, out and back course pretty much every day. I'm well aware of variety's status as the spice of life and of numerous coaches' admonitions to vary one's training both in order to avoid psychological burnout and to ensure that the body is regularly challenged with new stimuli, lest it adapt sucessfully to one repeated stress and then cease to improve.
Nonetheless, there was something other than a lack of imagination or comfort found in routine guiding my decision to plod along the same streets virtually every day of the week except Sunday, when I do my longest run on a course that, while it differs from my daily circuit, is also unchanging from week to week at this point.
Since I am in a base-building phase where my primary objective is to increase my mileage and in which each day's run would be a vanilla distance run of moderate pace and distance, my thought was that by running the same route every day and timing myself each time (without making any conscious effort to improve upon any previous time and trying to adhere strictly to the principle of running by feel - as much as I can, anyway, while being hyper-conscious of the duration of each day's run and what it might say about how quickly my fitness is improving and the tempatation that comes with that awareness to manipulate the results to suit my expectations of how quickly I feel I should be improving), I would be able to see over a series of days and weeks whether or not I was improving at all and, if so or if not, change the volume of my training accordingly.
A more typical (and perhaps more reasonable) approach would be to run a particular route once each week at a similar effort level and use that as my gauge and avoid the disappointments and false hopes that arise from the inexplicable fluctuations that bedevil any runner from one day to the next.
Unfortunately, I got sick and have missed a day here and there. An astute reader might ask if that fact might indicate a too quick increase in mileage, with which I'd be inclined to agree, having increased my mileage after two weeks in the mid to upper twenties to a week of 38 miles.
So, without deviating from my little experiment too much, I will simply shorten my five-miler to four miles over the same route on alternating days. That way I'll still have mile splits to compare. As it was, I didn't seem to be improving much and we'll see if the slight decrease in mileage helps remedy that situation.
For anyone that cares, I'll try to post weekly mileage totals from now and perhaps more detail from day to day and avoid these long-winded posts that could take up much less of the reader's time, and my own.
I think that dovetails nicely with my goal and that of runners everywhere: do the same thing in less time.
Nonetheless, there was something other than a lack of imagination or comfort found in routine guiding my decision to plod along the same streets virtually every day of the week except Sunday, when I do my longest run on a course that, while it differs from my daily circuit, is also unchanging from week to week at this point.
Since I am in a base-building phase where my primary objective is to increase my mileage and in which each day's run would be a vanilla distance run of moderate pace and distance, my thought was that by running the same route every day and timing myself each time (without making any conscious effort to improve upon any previous time and trying to adhere strictly to the principle of running by feel - as much as I can, anyway, while being hyper-conscious of the duration of each day's run and what it might say about how quickly my fitness is improving and the tempatation that comes with that awareness to manipulate the results to suit my expectations of how quickly I feel I should be improving), I would be able to see over a series of days and weeks whether or not I was improving at all and, if so or if not, change the volume of my training accordingly.
A more typical (and perhaps more reasonable) approach would be to run a particular route once each week at a similar effort level and use that as my gauge and avoid the disappointments and false hopes that arise from the inexplicable fluctuations that bedevil any runner from one day to the next.
Unfortunately, I got sick and have missed a day here and there. An astute reader might ask if that fact might indicate a too quick increase in mileage, with which I'd be inclined to agree, having increased my mileage after two weeks in the mid to upper twenties to a week of 38 miles.
So, without deviating from my little experiment too much, I will simply shorten my five-miler to four miles over the same route on alternating days. That way I'll still have mile splits to compare. As it was, I didn't seem to be improving much and we'll see if the slight decrease in mileage helps remedy that situation.
For anyone that cares, I'll try to post weekly mileage totals from now and perhaps more detail from day to day and avoid these long-winded posts that could take up much less of the reader's time, and my own.
I think that dovetails nicely with my goal and that of runners everywhere: do the same thing in less time.
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