speed

That's the current Big Question, stuck here in London.

Only got one run in so far -- an easy 4-miler in some beautiful English countryside. I limited it to four because the footpath I was on did a disappearing trick and left me surrounded by farm fields with no clue where to head next.

Up until just a few weeks ago I would have been able to answer this question exactly, to the .25 of a mile.

Now, gulp, I've realised that I am no longer keeping a training diary, let alone keeping a tally of distance covered.

In my new state of mind,to the question of "how many miles are you doing?" there are only three possible answers: Enough, Not Enough and Too Many.

Day after my late hill run I was expecting to feel sore and stiff. "They" tell us that downhill running is THE best way of experiencing DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), and that's usually true for me.

Got you there! No, not me...see the Chasing Kimbia Kenyans kick up dust in their first track workout of the year.

Not at some swish all-weather venue either, but a dirt track laid down in colonial times and opened by Her Majesty the Queen in the 1950s. (QE2 of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that is.)

As well as the clouds of dust, check out the trees swaying in the breeze. "Wind is not a factor for us".

See it at ChasingKimbia.com here.

That's the title of a great article by exercise physiologist extraordinaire Dr. Owen Anderson that rescued my workout today.

I'll see if I can get permission to publish it on the site; but there's a simple, lesson from it that I can share. Here it is: If you're feeling really, really "off" and don't think you can train -- do two intervals or seven minutes as fast as you can, THEN quit.

Today in Boulder was a summer's day. But I was so knackered (English expression meaning very, very tired, originating from what they do to exhausted horses) that I really wasn't up to what was on the schedule: a quality session involving quite a few reps at a decent pace.

Talking of speed work, intense training, oh, and poetry in motion, which we hadn't mentioned, but that's what we're all about, right? .... check this out:

One good run is all it takes...then the world is suddenly a better place.

And today was the day. A five-mile time trial I had been dreading. Another key piece in coach Bobby McGee's assessment of us sub-5 milers, the instructions for this one were to go out and get steady state heart rate data. Not an average heart rate; Bobby wants to know where our heart rate settles when we are committed to good pace cruise mode.

Lately I've been feeling tired and grungy. I'm flying one day, wiped out another -- and there's no pattern to it. I gave a pint of blood on Thursday (or that's what it felt like) to fuel some tests to see if we can find out what's going on. Meanwhile, I have cut back training to just every other day, in a bid to help my recovery from whatever it is that is bugging me.

It's working. All this easy runnning is having its effect.

I got up at 7am (you know how much I like that, not) to run with Patty. My legs were tired from the day before (did a hill run and ran across -- literally -- the skeleton of a racoon with its head attached, but that's another story)... so I gave my legs a rub before I went out, paying particular attention to "treating" the sore points a couple of inches below my knees -- Stomach 36 acupuncture points.

I did the strongest bit of sustained speed I have done for a LONG time: It was only about a mile, but around 7, maybe just sub-7 pace in part, on ice and various other bits of gunge.