Been a little while...

I know I have been slacking a little in the blogging department, but I am sure my four followers will cut me some slack!

There is not much going on in terms of running lately, just really grinding out miles as much as I can each week.  Last week I came down with Bronchitis which was finally diagnosed after running about 50 miles during the week.  The doc put me on antibiotics and an inhaler which helps but really just time will clear this up.  My doctor said that as long as I didn't have a fever there was no reason I couldn't still run, but everything I read online has said that its not a good idea so I took 2 days off including missing a long run over the weekend.

I know most people won't understand but getting faster and fitter is all about consistency and even missing a single run makes me feel like I set myself back slightly.  I have been sticking to a pretty rigid schedule which gets stressful so I am taking a new approach until my racing starts in April which is to plan on running within a given range for a week.

I have done quite a bit of research lately on training theory and programs and most of the really top level coaches focus on theories developed by Arthur Lydiard.  His premise was to break training out into cycles for base building, strength, speed and sharpening.  Right now I am focusing on base building which is the foundation for his whole program. The general premise is everyone's performance has a limit which is based on their aerobic conditioning so the idea is to run as many possible miles each week at easy aerobic effort in order to set your ceiling as high as possible.  My initial thought was 70 miles or so would be sufficient for my baseline but Lydiard recommends around 100 miles a week as the best range for optimum performance.  I don't think I can get there this year but I am at least going to push my limits and try to get up to between 80 - 90 miles a week.

In order to do this, I started extending all of my non-recovery runs to a minimum of 10 miles.  The first week straight up sucked and I was hurting badly.  However, my body is starting to adapt and a 10 mile run feels like my 6 mile runs used to where no matter how I was feeling I could bang one out at an easy pace.  My goal is going to be to add a mile or two to each of the non-double 10 milers each week to get to the point where if I am running a double it will be 10 in the AM and 6 in the PM and if it is a single day it will be between 13-15 miles. The only downside is right now I can only run two hard efforts each week, a long run and a threshold run, where as I would try to run two threshold runs (one aerobic and one anaerobic) previously.

I am pretty happy so far with what I am seeing in terms of results so far even in just a short period of time because my easy pace has been drifting down into the 7:00-7:30 range where as it was previously 7:30-8:00 and the runs are typically longer.

That is the boring update on running...

As for anything else interesting, I did spend a week out in Redwood City, CA for a leadership council which was interesting.  I couldn't believe how weird the weather is out there because I would run in the mornings and it would feel like New England (30-40 degrees) and then later in the day I'd go out for my second run and it would 60+ degrees.  Not sure people how can deal with those swings.

I did see a ton of people running out there which makes me jealous because the city is really designed around people being active. There are tons of running trails/parks and the street lights are actually on when they need to be so you can run before sunrise or after sunset and the lights are at regular intervals.

I hate to admit it but one of my runs out there turned out to be a disaster.  I have a normal route that I run from the hotel to the bay that is about a 4 mile loop. I typically run it clockwise and have never had any issues but for some reason this time I decided to run counter-clockwise and proceeded to miss an important turn that brings me back to the hotel.  Because of this I spent about 30 minutes running around in circles in a small community that literally only had a single exit.  It was full of side roads and circles and it all began to look the same and I was running towards what I thought was the hotel only to find out that I was running in circles. I probably should have known when I passed the same group of kids waiting at the bus stop for the 3rd time. Oh well I guess, at least I eventually got back to the hotel...