Day 205, 160 To Go

July 24, 2013

Let's pretend that I have kept up with my blog.  Let's forget that it has been a few days since I posted anything (six days, actually).  Let's just pretend that so I can feel better about myself for being a lazy ass.  Seriously.  I could blame a lot of things (Honey) for distracting me (Honey) and keeping me busy (Honey) and not allowing me to write (Honey), but I won't.  I'll take the high road.

Today, I am going to write about rule #2 from The 25 Golden Rules of Running from Runner's World magazine.  This is a rule I have utilized quite a bit in the past couple of years, and when I have followed this rule, I have stayed away from injury.  As soon as I ignore it, I get hurt.  Without further ado...

2. The 10-Percent Rule
Increase weekly training mileage by no more than 10 percent per week.

The Exception: If you're starting at single-digit weekly mileage after a layoff, you can add more than 10 percent per week until you're close to your normal training load.

This has to be one of the most broken rules out there.  This is especially true for really motivated runners returning from an injury or training for a big race.  10% is not a lot to increase your miles (or time, for those of you who run by time instead of miles).  If you ran 20 miles this week, that means you can only run 22 next week.  The challenge you face is how do you spread those miles up over all of your runs?  It is next to impossible.

The good news is that usually, it refers to two areas.  1.) Your weekly miles and 2.) Your long run.  This means, that if you run 20 miles Monday through Saturday and then 10 miles on Sunday, you can at 2 miles to your Mon - Sat runs and 1 mile to your Sunday run.  So sure, you are still only increasing your overall miles by 10 % (20 + 10 = 30, 30 * 10% = 3) but it is easier to spread it out over your weekly runs if you do it separately.

The exception can apply if you happened to take a week or two off.  You don't need to just increase your mileage by only 10% in this instance because it could take you forever to get back to your normal mileage.  However, don't go crazy.  Ramping up your mileage too fast is always a recipe for disaster! 

Here are our numbers:

Time: 25:00

Distance: 2.16 miles

Pace: 11:33/m

Max Pace: 8:46/m

Calories:191
Avg HR: 109

Max HR: 125

Unfortunately, Honey had some knee pain today and she was unable to complete the run.  She just didn't run that last few minutes.  I made sure she iced her knee when we got back and she'll have to take a couple of days off.  I think the speed work might have taken a toll on her.  We'll back off on that for a little while until we can strengthen her knees a bit.

Run for Life!