Last week I surpassed two months since I started running again. To “celebrate” this, I went 5 days without a run and got a little taste of what it was like to not exercise again. I didn’t take much of a taste to recognize that I still don’t like the restlessness, poor sleeping, and lethargy that I feel when not exercising regularly. Good thing broke the cycle by getting out the door for a run this morning!
It wasn’t a long one, just 4 miles, but I already feel much better.
As I already mentioned, I wanted to talk a little about the 2 months of training that I have completed. Let’s take a look at some of the totals:
There are a few runs, the first half-dozen or so that I did in February, where I didn’t take my GPS with me, so those are not included in these totals. All in all, not too bad! Not counting today’s workout, I did 23 runs, going from a run of 23 minutes on February 16 to start off my “comeback.” Compare that with my longest run during this time, 8.13 miles in 1 hour 8 minutes and change on April 3, and you can see the progress I’ve made. I am looking forward to taking a crack at a 10+ mile run in the not-too-distant future.
It only makes sense that with the progress I have been making that I would start to think about some sort of competitive event to use as a goal to keep me going. Last week I started thinking about two events this fall – the Taroko Gorge Marathon and the Ironman 70.3 Taiwan triathlon. The latter event, from what I understand, will be run for the very first time this year, so it would be pretty neat to be a part of that. But the Taroko Gorge Marathon is pretty unique in its own right, owing to its location and topography. To top it all off, they will be held on successive weekends in late October and early November, effectively guaranteeing that it will have to be either-or for me (I do not recover nearly fast enough to even entertain the notion of trying to do both events). If I decide that the triathlon will be the way to go, then maybe, just maybe, if I can keep momentum for multisport training going afterwards, I could parlay that into the berth at the 2011 Ironman China that I have had my eye on for a long time. Developing…
In researching the Taroko Gorge marathon a bit, I came across the blog from a fellow in Taipei who ran it last fall and felt really good. He said that he used a training plan called the Hanson's plan, from the Hanson-Brooks Distance Project. (For more about the project itself, see this 2007 Runner's World magazine profile.) For my last marathon, the 2009 Big Sur Marathon, I followed the "Run Less, Run Faster" plan promulgated by the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training. I liked that it only required me to run 3 days a week, allowing me to allocate the remainder of my scarce free time to studying Chinese and spending with my family, but a significant drawback of the program, in my view, is that since there are only 3 runs a week and overall mileage is relatively low (I think I topped out at about 40 miles a week at the program's heaviest volume period) and advocated long training runs of 20 miles several times during the course of the program, you end up doing 50% of your weekly mileage in one run at some points. It worked out OK for me for most of the way through the program, up until about a month prior to the marathon, when I slightly injured my lower leg on a long run. I pretty much had to curtail running after that, which is one way, I guess, to ensure that I had a good rest, a really long taper, up to the race, but probably not optimal. Thus, the marathon was tough for me - not my best finish time, let's put it that way. Plus, it's a hilly course. Taroko will be a hilly course, too, but it sounds like the Hanson's plan worked out really well for this fellow. It is intriguing to me, since it calls for near-daily runs (6 days a week). I think that might be kind of hard to fit in to my schedule, but because the volume is greater and the plan's longest run tops out at 16 miles, that means you are never running such a high percentage of your overall weekly mileage in one day, which should decrease the chance for injury. I might try the Hanson's program out this year, we shall see.
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