miles

Day 1 Restart Phase: easy 10 miles on trails out past Wonderland Lake and onto the Eagle Trail Loop. Basically one mile trending uphill to start with, then four miles downhill to the turn at 45 minutes, four miles back up and then the downhill finish.

Praise be that although there was a stiff wind, it was nowhere near as strong as when I did this same run last week. So although there was less help going out, there was nothing much to battle against on the way back.

Already there is progress; last time out I ran at 8:55 pace for 84 minutes covering 9.5 miles at an average heart rate of 130. Today it was 8:42 pace for 87 minutes covering 10 miles with an average of 129. It felt pretty easy, apart from a slight cramp in that bu-ttock when I restarted after a pause for a glug of Cytomax.

That seems to be how long it takes for me to become semi-human after a hard training session.

Lately I've realised that training is not really all that simple.

I mean, we go out, train, come back, recover, then do more training. After talking to Hawaii-based coach Brian Clarke -- and reading his other book "Running by Feeling" -- I started to pay attention to my feelings between training sessions. He has a state of mind/fitness that he calls "ready to run hard"; I used to think that this was just a matter of will-power, but actually it's not, it';s a function of how well-prepared you are, how rested you are, what your level of life stress is -- and how well you have recovered from the last training session.

... what a shame I've only done 36.

Mu left Achilles hurts, my right knee has a mobile ache, this morning my back went into spasm. Oh yes, and it's sub-30 degrees and snowing, I guess just to make sure we here can fully appreciate Bobby's North Pole run.

I wouldn't mind, but this was supposed to be an Easy Week.

I've just stumbled in from a one-hour, six-mile "run", that was actually great fun apart from my guilt about it being so slow. I'd seized the moment as soon as the snow stopped and sun reappeared, but by the time I got out on the trail it was so muddy that I was soon running like Frankenstein's monster. I had to abandon the trail and do my return loop on the verge at the side of the highway, finally detouring through a new housing neighborhood. See, we can do "urban" in Boulder, too.

I've been training on my own too long.

Met up with Patty early this morning for our first run together for months. It's been so long that in the meantime she's become a US Masters national cross-country champion and clocked a near national record indoor 1500. Like I said, I knew her when she was nothing :)

My last few months have been "comparatively unsuccessful" (heh heh), to the point that I was beginning to suspect that the virus and low iron stores double-whammy had damaged my heart muscle. Or something. Because as well as feeling tired a lot of the time, I've been unable to get my heart rate up past 70% of max level, making "threshold" training runs a bit of a joke.

If I seem to have gone quiet for a couple of days, it's because I've been having my brain re-wired.

It all started when I found Rich Gibbens' site www.powerrunning.com. Rich has got the finest collection I've seen of science-based articles questioning the "more miles the better" school of thought. The "aerobic madness" theory has dominated distance running -- and caused so many injuries and wrecked careers -- for too long. It's way past time for a change.

But change is hard: it hurts the brain.

Rich is one of a handful of independent thinkers who are closely examining what the latest research into training, physiology, biology and genetics, has to tell us about running faster. If the conclusions were put into practice, they would revolutionize the way we train. But you only need to look at the advice in Runners' World and Running Times and suchlike to realise that it's not going to happen any time soon.

Well, today had finally came. Today marks the first time in 2 years that I ran 4 miles. I had to much to deal with and for some reason or another just would not run much past 3 miles. That changed today. Last night at work, I decided that I was going to run 4 miles today, and I did. The journey out was much easier than the journey back. On the return run, the wind was very bitter cold and at times strong. Not only did I complete the 4 mile run, I did not allow the wind to keep me back. I ran hard at times and yes, there were times I walked took. The run walk percentage was about 70/30. == Ran 70%, walked 30%. The wind is why otherwise, it would be different.