Weekly Summary: 2/24/08 - 3/2/08 (track work, steady state, tempo, long run)

As I write this, it's twelve days until the distance carnival. It's time to stop daydreaming about the race because now it's not looming off in the future - it's become completely real.

My focus this week was on the track work at race pace. The goal was to go longer intervals than last week and still feel comfortable running them. I'd say I succeeded, because I actually felt more comfortable with the 7x1200 I did this week than the 10x800 I did last week.

I'm carrying a bit of long-term built up fatigue in my legs now. It's the kind that you're supposed to build up over a long training block. It makes me feel like I doing it right, because although I know I'm working hard, it also feels sustainable. I can still perform well on any given day, and I'm taking enough recovery to keep from wearing down. At the moment, my estimation is that my training level is completely appropriate to my fitness and goals.

I'm not tapering for the 10K, but I will take an easy week before it. So next week will be my last hard training. I put money in the bank this week with a solid steady state in the arroyo and a good Thursday tempo w/speed sprinkled on top.

One thing I've changed recently is that I've let go of an old neurosis of mine: accounting. I want to take an approach towards training that is focused on feel and intuition. I want to use inspired guesswork more than quantitative analysis in my own training, despite my desire to look at others' training en masse in a quantitative and statistical manner.

So, because I want to focus on the role of each training element and the way the workouts make me feel (because ultimately what matter on the line is not what workouts you did but what physiology you achieved, and your biofeedback is an excellent barometer for your physiology), I'm not counting my miles, or even my minutes, in total.

I don't know how many minutes I ran this week because I didn't count warmups and cool downs and other such nonsense. A warmup shouldn't be a number - it should be a run that gets to ready to work out. So I'm not tracking it because when I do, I feel internal pressure to run a bit more, to squeeze out some extra minutes on my easy days or cool downs.

But I'm already hitting a long run each week along with a long steady state. That's enough work for me aerobically - a few piddly miles here and there aren't going to help much. Throw in a fartlek and a track session and I need to keep my recovery slow and easy. Miles are a popular metric for runners because they're easy to track, easy to compare, and easy to do. Not, at least in my opinion, because they're (in and of themselves) closely correlated to performance. People who run a lot of miles frequently perform very well. But it's because they're running a lot. Not because they're writing down big numbers.

So that's my paradigm. I'm focusing on each individual workout as it comes, trying to understand how it fits in the overall training picture. The log lets me take a moment at the end of each day, week, training block, and season, to reflect on how effective these pieces were individually and as a whole. It's the experiment of one, and this is how I'm choosing to conduct it.

Next week I'll tweak my schedule a bit to accommodate the fact that I worked out today rather than yesterday, and to help Matt through his tough track work on Tuesday. The plan is:

Monday: recovery
Tuesday: steady state, some pace work for Matt
Wednesday: recovery
Thursday: long
Friday: recover
Saturday: 5x1600m @ 5:00, short rest (6 days before distance carnival)
Sunday: NFTC