Wednesday, September 17, 2008 (medium long, plyos)

AM: 90 minutes, dodging the grass-mowing guy
PM: Susan's plyos, lifting

I'm glad I didn't attempt a full-length long run this week, since I felt depleted to the point of weak legs and odd something-about-my-entire-body-is-not-quite-right sensations by a simple 90-minute run. I guess I had about a 13-hour gap between my last meal (salmon cooked by Kangway) and the beginning of this run, so I was simply on low fuel reserves. Still it was a little unsettling to be so wiped from a fairly-easy run. I took a two hour nap in the afternoon despite sleeping 8 or 8.5 hours the night before.

Lots of people think they'll have a "bouncing baby boy", but Susan's will be the bounciest. I tried hard to keep focused for her plyo session, despite anything she might tell you about my smart-aleck remarks. I'm clumsy at these. I focused more on "doing it right" than "doing it well", i.e. bound smoothly, not far.

It's hard for me to say whether or not I think these exercises have value as a distance runner. Certainly they are secondary or tertiary training. But as to whether they're helpful, it's impossible to say because I don't do them enough. We do plyos three or four times in the cross country season, and then that's it for the entire year.

Their stated intent is, I believe, to help the efficiency of your stride. There are other forms of plyos that should help your peak power output or speed of movement, but that's another story. There's no doubt in my mind that practicing the plyos would make me better at doing them. But as far as I can tell my stride is pretty good - not a thing of beauty, but it seems to get the job done, and people occasionally comment to tell me that I look like I'm putting out less effort than other runners at the same pace.

After eight years (I'm now a quarter way through my eighth year of running), I don't think my form will change drastically, although it's possible it could, especially at faster paces which I run less frequently. On the other hand, changes in efficiency could also result from physiological changes that don't necessarily manifest in the stride.

The plyos do make me tired - that much is clear. So they're an investment. I'll try to keep up with them through the winter and see whether it's a worthy investment or not.