You Always Get What You Want; (believe it or not)

After a year of 6 days on, one day off I have just began a new training cycle, harking back to my most successful racing days. Beginning this week I am 13 days on with one day off. Today was the first Thursday run in a LONG time, it has always my rest day before the big weekend but now things have changed.

Why change? I feel that this risk has great potential benefits to increasing my overall workload and therefor provide additional stimulus to compete at a higher level. Toward this goal I am now up to 60 miles each week and shooting for a peak of 80 by the summer time leading into the Chattooga 50k and its revamped course.

These are mileages my body has seen previously, so I am not as concerned about injury potential, not that concerned. I will continue with mostly easy (while still seeking those hills out), aerobic efforts, especially in the initial weeks of increase. This is nothing groundbreaking, of course. Just the old advice from many veteran runners. Like Frank Shorter says, "If you want to run better, you need to run as much as you can... if you want to run faster, you need... to run faster."

And that is the final piece to this puzzle, to get away from the comfortable, easy cruise intervals of the marathon program and inject a little blaze into Tuesdays. For the last few weeks I've been adding some higher end 'speed' work as well as the disguised hill blast workouts. Sprinting the last half of hills with explosive strides. I feel slow and not-powerful... but we start somewhere. I know the body is less willing to do new things than the mind... so I, and my mind will keep on with this plan until the body is ready to accept it. I can feel it already considering the benefits while still holding its stubborn ways.

This is running karma. You get more of what you have become.