Time to Sharpen

The last two days have pretty much confirmed that I took it way too easy on Monday. I woke up on Tuesday morning and felt absolutely no soreness from the race. I was planning on taking the morning off as a precaution, so at lunch I went out and did 10 miles and felt fine the entire time. Today was another easy day with 10 in the morning and 7 in the afternoon.

In doing some post-mortem on the race, I went back and looked at my training over the past month. The one thing that really jumped out at me, as Mike (or StarCrunch as he apparently wants to be referred to nowadays) eluded to in yesterday's comments, is that lately I pretty much stopped doing the faster than tempo pace stuff altogether. Part of that is because all my training has been so inconsistent lately, part of it has been because my knee still is bothering me when I go really fast, and part of it is just plain laziness.

So this afternoon, as part of my 7 mile run, I decided to try some strides to see how it felt. Wow. It was pretty much the most unnatural, awkward feeling thing I have had in a long time. I was actually scared that there might be someone around watching me, because everything felt out of synch and slow. I mean it was like I forgot how to run fast. Now normally, I feel this way for about half of the first stride and then things start to smooth out, but this time, the feeling lasted pretty much the whole time. I've never been a big believer in the value of strides. I always thought there was more value in just running an extra mile as opposed to stopping and doing striders. However, after doing them fairly regularly this year, and I must say, I have slowly changed my attitude. Maybe it's mental, but I do seem to run better when they are part of my regular routine.

Now, I'm not saying that I would have nailed my goal on Monday if I'd have just kept up on my striders over the past month. However, what you get on race day is a mixture of a lot of different ingredients. I think I got the base and the endurance stuff down pretty good right now. Now I need to work on sharpening. I want to peek in 6 weeks, so now is the time to start hinting to my body that the time is near. Today's strides were just a little wake-up call. With some longer more targeted fast stuff over the next few weeks, hopefully, things will get faster from here.