No pressure no diamond
What a great quote. With 22 weeks to go, I'm still focusing on base mileage, but I've learned from my lengthy winter cycle that base doesn't mean slow. Not always, anyway. Lo and behold, when you regularly include some threshold pace and strides during the base phase, your overall efficiency and paces improve across the board.
I noticed that this morning. I was able to comfortably run 18 in about 1:57 with the last five in 29:44. I need to go back through my logs to quantify this, but subjectively my sense is that I was a complete idiot not to have included some higher-end aerobic work in my winter build-up. It may not have cost me anything...hell, maybe it saved me from injury. But I can say with certainty that it is extremely uncomfortable both psychologically and physically to struggle through the month or so that it takes to comfortably do a marathon pace workout after running so many slow base miles. It's easy to get frustrated if you don't know what's coming.
posted at 9:34 AM [+]
2 Comments:
Probably wouldn't be such a hard transition if you didn't have to run 5:44 pace. Jokes aside, you gotta post the plan, man. Just how does a man build and keep improving for 9+ months en route to his date with destiny? Illuminate us, we need to know!
I think the concept of training cyclicality developed by Lydiard has been misinterpreted by the mainstream running press, and even more scandalously, by most collegiate track coaches.
If you study his methods closely (and follow up that study with the volumes of physiological study conducted since), you'll see that the increased capacities provided by peaking activities (heavy anaerobic training, rest, diet manipulation, etc.) don't enable massive performance improvements (the measurements indicate 2-5% improvements at best over steady-state training). Put simply, you're not likely going to run a 28-minute 10k at the end of your cycle if you can't run 29:00 at the beginning of it.
My point is, train the whole organism. Steady, balanced training with properly metered progression can give you steady improvement. Pick a broader range of paces in your training, just keep away from the extremes.
You're starting to do that now, and I'm getting excited for you.
PS - Cal Int'l was slower; I was only 50 mpw and doing an IPO at the time.
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