A "Good" Workout

The goal this year is to do good workouts. Not great workouts, and of course not bad workouts...just good ones. Every day. If you were to look at my training over the first 8 years of my marathon years, it would look like something like the elevation chart of the Boston Marathon. Up and down, up and down. I would have a great day, followed by nothing, followed by a Herculean effort the next day, followed by squeezing in a 4 miler on wobbly legs the next day. It got me to the finish line of 14 marathons so far, but I always figured there had to be a better way.

I would read Jack Daniels tell me that I should feel energized after doing a tempo run, and I would just stare at the book (or magazine or computer screen), in absolute amazement. Enegerized? After a tempo run? I was fairly certain that the tempo run was created in some 3rd world country as a punishment for some heinous crime to humanity. I pictured a judge sitting on his bench sentencing a thief to 15 days of tempo running over the next 30 days (even a judge would have to allow for recovery...right?), as the defense lawyer shouted his protests.

However, I think I'm starting to get it. Instead of going out and racing my tempo runs, I'm starting to understand what the term "comfortably hard" means. It gets tossed around quite a bit and I always kind of ignored the comfortably part and just did everything hard. Those were my peaks on my elevation chart. The next day would be my valley as I was too wiped out to do anything.

Today, I did 8 miles with 25 minutes at tempo pace of 5:42, and the overall pace for the 8 miles at 5:58. It was comfortably hard, and guess what. I felt energized when I was done. Maybe that Jack Daniels guy knows what he's talking about.

Less than 2 hours later, I headed out for a quick 6 mile recovery run. The extra short rest between my two runs today was less than ideal, and I certainly don't want to make a habit of it, but sometimes you just have to roll with the punches and that's what today was. What I've found as I have begun to explore the world of high mileage, is that keeping your mileage consistently high is a mindframe that you need to embrace. While that second 6 miler today wasn't make or break for my week, it keeps me mentally in the game and on-pace for 100 miles this week. You have to take motivation where you can find it sometimes.