Saturday, December 3, 2011

Back in to hard training

This week was my first week back into serious training. After Rothman, I took about a week off, which was convenient as I got to relax around Thanksgiving and the time off from school. Once I got back to school I jumped in with both feet and started running a lot again. I purposefully didn't slowly ease into running again, because I have never had problems with jumping back in and I would rather get the awful tired feeling of running a lot out of the way sooner rather than later. After about 3 days of consistently bigger miles I was pretty much flat on my back, but today (6 days after I started) I actually felt good on the run. Hopefully I am coming out of the "valley of fatigue" because I want to be able to do well on finals next week!

Once I get acclimated to regular out of season mileage again, hopefully in a week or two, I want to get to doing serious strength work. By that I mean long intervals and tempo runs, similar to what I did this past summer to prepare for Philly RnR Half. Those workouts really made me feel strong and I think they gave me a great foundation on which to do more 5k or 10k specific work later in the winter and spring. In past cycles I have just tried to run a lot of miles, sometimes at the expense of recovery and thus compromising some workouts. This time around I think I'll be able to get fitter by taking my easy days easier, letting me get more out of the hard days. One thing I'll prioritize this year is getting faster; if I want to run 14:10 for 5k I had better be comfortable running 68s for longer repeats. That will probably take a lot of practice to acclimate my body to that.

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