Acceleration

Mister Buddy and Miss Beans. As requested, here are the kids. Mister Buddy is two months old, and Miss Beans is almost two years. They definitely keep us busy.

I mentioned in my last post that I was frustrated with how little I seemed to have gained in terms of overall fitness. Looking back over my logs, I can see that all I was really doing for almost 1500 miles was recovery runs. Almost all of my running was done at heart rates between 125-135. At first, staying in this range was the only way I could manage 100+ miles a week, and after a couple of weeks, it was all I could manage without getting really tired. Pushing up into the low 140s was actually difficult, and required the kind of recovery usually reserved for a late season, high-volume interval session. If I had not had a heart rate monitor on, I would have slowed down, thinking I was pushing too hard.

What I have done the last couple of weeks is try to gain some perspective on my training, as well as try to get a handle on what I need to do to start progressing toward the marathon in October. I cut my mileage down to 60 and 64 miles for each of the past two weeks, respectively. I added some faster easy running, with several runs over an hour and under 7:00 mile pace. I also was able to complete about 7 miles between 5:30 and 6:00 pace over the course of three runs.

I found that while I hadn't completely wasted my time running too slow, the bottom line was it was nowhere near my best aerobic pace. I ran this way for such a long time that my muscles 'forgot' how to run faster than about 6:30 pace. As I had hoped, I have made huge gains in the past two weeks, running my heart rate well into the 140s and even into the low 150s without feeling wiped out for the following three days. It's still tough, but it's getting easier.

Lesson learned? Mileage and pace should not be mutually exclusive. There has to be balance across the entire range of paces, heart rates, and distances. With this in mind, I can spend the next 200 days building toward my goal race in a much more effective way than I was before.