Still Thinking and Reading

Wednesday- 0 miles .... still too damn sore
Thursday- 2 miles- mainly running

Yesterday I spent 8 hours traveling to southcamp and ran late in the evening. It was mainly running, but still so sore. I hate down time for recovery and despite being a PT and KNOWING I should cross train and what not I hate that too. Only non-running I like is Kayaking and I really am looking forward to getting back on the water.

Anyway I know the stress and adapt thing is vital so I am not pushing the running...when I am recovered I will again get on it mileage-wise. Need to get in a couple big weeks in the next 3 for sure. I assume my next long run will not kill me as much due to the muscles learning not to get so traumatically torn apart at the cellular level (and thus not as much of an immune/swelling/needed repair response)....Ie.. not as sore. Generically I call it quad invincibility. For me it take 3 beat down efforts....then my quads pretty much can't get sore. Saturdays effort was the 2nd.

Anyway I have been thinking and reading more about training and picked this one off my good buddy's webpage: I Run Far. This is a great read-from HADD -off the letsrun.com fame..... here are some relevant highlights related to my post yesterday about myself and how I have not produced as good of performances at longer distances:

"To sum up; if you are well trained aerobically, you do not fall apart (as in my example from yesterday's post about my PR's) when the race gets longer. The reasons are usually at least one (and maybe both) of two things from the athlete concerned:"
1. Low mileage background in training
2. Whatever mileage being done is being run “too fast” (for performance level)

For me:
#1 Could be argued.... I have averaged 2100-2800miles a year in my serious training years
#2- Is exactly what I have been determining with good 10+ year hindsight now

I have always trained in the past under the impression that I would get better the harder I ran. Thus I tended to pound intervals often....progression was via a shortening of the rests period or by adding more reps. But I never ran tempo or lactate threshold type runs. It was easy conversational pace or intervals. Period.

thus my tolerance for lactate continued to suck and my perfromances show that

I even used to get pissed at my teammates for "racing" easy days or our weekly 10-12 milers since they then would not be rested enough to POUND the next set of intervals. Training on my own post college..... I would randomly pick 6:00pace per mile as a "tempo" pace and try to extend my tolerance of it every week or two. Sometimes this worked well as it was probably pretty close to LT pace for me at the time and was tolerable. Other times it destroyed me and eventually I shied away completely from anything other than conversational pace. One thing I did do that seemed to work well was hill repeats 4-6minutes in length done 3-10 times. The strength gains from the hill were great and running back down allowed even more muscle gains due to the eccentric work. They beat me up but I at least allowed enough time for proper recovery.

Okay to summarise this babble: I plan to do more specific running for the next year and a half with the hope of running a sub 2:30 marathon.
Staples will be
1) 10 mile runs done at just sub-lactate threshold pace (half marathon race pace)
2) Jack Daniels specific cruise interval pace workouts done with a lengthy warm up
3) The infamous JD (tempo / easy hour/ tempo) run
4) Runs of 2+ hours

Now time for some easy miles!