Running Pace

I was talking with my friend Greg the other day about Swimmers. He is amazed at how much swim training swimmers do for what amounts to fairly short events. He wonders why? I told him we runners would do the same thing if we could but because running hurts so much we can't.

On the same day I was talking to Marco about his running. He has a running partner who lives by his Garmin and wants to up the pace of their easy runs because he heard of another high school runner doing that. I told  Marco "That's crazy talk, the worst thing you can do is follow another's training".

I also told him "This is preseason, the only reason you need to know your pace is to slow yourself down, your goal is to build strength and stamina through frequency and length not pace. The only time pace matters is on the track"

Then I went out and practiced what I preached. Poor recovery is either from poor rest, poor nutrition or going too hard too often. As I've said I've struggled with recovery. I preach to Marco and other runners, go slow and easy when your workout is meant to be slow and easy. Go hard when it's meant to be hard. Don't mix them up. (Another thing Swimmers do is go hard day after day, because they can). I thought good and hard about my own workouts and realized I was mixing it up. So Tuesday I wore my heart monitor and stuck to it. My max allowable Heart Rate was 135 which is the top of my Aerobic Capacity or MAF. My run was painfully slow.

I'm confident that when I wake up on the day of my hard running, I won't be tired and I will be ready to lay some hard running down.

It's a good life....