Monday after a holiday weekend is about the worst time ever. Not only would I rather be home watching Sportscenter for the 3rd time this morning, but I wouldn’t have to actually do work. And yet here I am, at my desk dutifully working and taking a brief break to post and keep my blog updated for my adoring fan or fans.
Yesterday I picked Annie up from the airport in the morning and dropped her at church so she could go sing and get paid. I was going to park and run from there, but decided against it because it was markedly warmer by that point than it had been when I left to go to BWI. I had my running tights on, but was already hot just sitting in the car. So I went back to the apartment, changed into some shorts and headed out.
Even though I know I can go as far as 8 miles at an easy pace, I stepped it back to just 5 yesterday. I am currently reading “Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide” by Hal Higdon, which I got as a gift for my birthday. Throughout the book, Higdon has talked about overtraining, which is basically a combination of stressing your muscles too much, ramping up your mileage or speed too quickly, and getting burnt out mentally on running. The more I thought about my running the past two months (since the end of August, really), I came to the realization that I am probably overtraining relative to my current ability. I was trying to get too far too fast and as a result, was not enjoying running as much as I used to. Moreover, I was getting tired of the treadmill day in and day out. This probably made me subconsciously procrastinate on going to the gym and generally not being as dedicated to my running as I’d like to be.
To remedy this, I’m scaling back and then slowly building my mileage up in preparation for the National Half Marathon. Better to feel good after running 5 miles than to feel like not running 8 miles at all. Added to this is my new Forerunner, which has allowed me to run outdoors in the mornings with a constant stream of data, which satisfies my frontal lobe. I never saw the use of running and not having some way of knowing how far you’ve run and how fast you’ve done it in. Certainly people did this before the invention of GPS, but the technology makes the computations effortless. Instead of monitoring your watch or a stopwatch, etc, there’s one device that does it all and more for you. Brilliant. Anyway, running outside is such a vast improvement over the stuffy gym. Not only is it more comfortable running in 40 degree weather rather than 80 degrees indoors, since you’re actually moving, it’s more rewarding.
Thus far, I have been pleased with how I feel with this schedule. Of course, I have only been following the schedule for a week, but I had no problem meeting the first week’s demands.
Sunday’s run took me from my apartment in downtown Baltimore around the Inner Harbor and then into Federal Hill for a bit. I have another 5 miler scheduled for this Sunday and will probably run the same course again for simplicity. Here is my route from MapMyRun.com.
Here is this week’s schedule:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 3 miles
Wednesday: 4-mile tempo
Thursday: 3 miles
Friday: Rest
Saturday: Cross TrainingSunday: 5-mile long run
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