Day 60, 305 To Go

March 1, 2013

Its the beginning of the month and with that, I am going to begin doing some new things with my running and my training overall.  This isn't written in stone - I have four kids, so pretty much everything is written in erasable markers - but I am going to try to bring some structure to my runs.  Here are a few things I want to do or do more consistently:

1. I want to make sure I do my long Sunday runs consistently.  A review of my February numbers shows that I missed two long runs, although one was a little longer than normal
2. I want to run fast at least one run a week until I have increased my times and I am able to do real speed work.
3. Every run I want to focus on an aspect of my form
4. I want to do more cross training.  That could mean more biking, swimming or weightlifting

That's enough I think.  Oh, and I need to start working in 20 minute runs starting in a couple of weeks.  A general rule of thumb is that you don't want to increase your workload by more than 10% week to week.  So, if I am supposed to start running 20 minutes every day starting in April, I need to work into it.  My plan is to work two 20 minute runs into my week every week starting in two weeks.  Do you think if I tried, I could have worked the work week one more time into that last sentence?

So, that will mean when April starts, I will be running 20 minutes 4 times a week and the 7th day is my long run.  In that first week, I will add the final two days of 20 minutes and I'll be running 20 minutes every day!

Today, I ran fast, so I took care of number 2 above.

Here are my numbers:

Time: 15:00

Distance: 1.90 miles

Pace: 7:54/m

Max Pace: 6:55/m

Calories: 248

Avg HR: 148

Max HR: 166

It isn't my fastest.  I fell short by one second per mile.  Will have to try and improve on that every week.  The difficulty is that it takes me at least 5 minutes to get warmed up so I can't run too fast.  Perhaps if I warmed up before I started running (always a good idea) then I wouldn't have this problem.  I'll take that under advisement...

Run for life!