Feed him when you can

With Ice Age and the Big Hill Bonk moving to the fall, it will be a packed format with 4 races in 6 weeks.  I had just finished my last long training run when the news came from all venues that things will be on hold awhile.  March still ended up decent with 330 miles.  I woke up in the middle of the night and penned a training format that is still on my desk.  I was going to do a big write up on the methodology, but I’m going to muddle through it and make adjustments as I put it to practice.

The main construct comes from the Kenny Moore idea of 2 easy days followed by 1 hard day.  I laid that out and so every 3 week cycle allows 7 hard days.  I adjusted the schedule in a manner that suits me, which means it starts on a Monday with the first hard day is a Tuesday.  Plugging in the hard days yielded 3 short and fast tempo run days, 2 days of hard race pace effort (Ice Age level) at 1:30 and a 2:00 hour duration and 2 long runs of 3 hours and 5 hours.  Once I started filling it out I could see a lot of resemblance to the 3 week cycles Mr. Kevin Beck uses.  This reminded me that all the easy days were not just jogging around, but a fair amount of solid moderate efforts.  I did not want to do a lot of 10-12 milers on the easier days, so I decided to break many of those efforts into 2 a days because I’m old.  Still wanting to keep things honest my thought was to incorporate Ingrid Kristiansen type training which in short was 45 minute efforts at high aerobic effort.  The idea is you get used to running faster and the 45 minute range helps you from digging into the reserves.

Now there is no way to stay motivated for 5-6 months of this, so I am in tinker mode.  I’ll maintain the format, but not get too rigid the next couple months.  So far so good.  Some days when tired I just run super easy in between hard days.  Other days I do in between hard days I practice the high aerobic stuff.  My main focus now is Ice Age on September 26.  My main concern is my right knee.  I twisted it about 6-7 years ago on the IA trail.  It has shown sharp pains since, but they are regular now.  Especially when running uphill.  Not enough to fret yet, but I have to figure this out.  After I finish my first 3 week cycle I’ll post the results.