Log #17: Hitting My Stride

I think my body has finally accepted the fact that we are now "training" and it would be appropriate to act as such. For the past few weeks I've seen progress, albeit slowly, but I felt like my body was just responding at too sluggish a pace. Over the last week I've noticed a pretty huge spike in my energy levels, my clothes suddenly got really loose, and I've had 3 killer workouts in the last week. This morning was a speed workout. I decided to do it on a treadmill because I've noticed that my sense of pace is pretty unreliable, and I generally run too fast. The treadmill let's me just do my run and not think about the pace, and the whole time my legs are hopefully "learning" what it feels like to run at a certain pace.

I'll take this opportunity to talk about treadmill running vs. real running. I actually love treadmills because you literally HAVE to run at whatever speed it's set to or else you'll be flying off the treadmill onto your ass. It's easier to push yourself for longer periods of time because you can just zone out for a few minutes and your legs will do the rest. When you run for real, you have to constantly make sure you're maintaing the correct pace and fight the urge to slow down. Obviously a treadmill workout can't give you the same mental pressures as a real run, which is why I'm trying to do more "real" running for this marathon. Being in good physical shape is only 50% of being able to run a marathon... probably far less than 50% actually. If you're running on a treadmill, set the incline to 1.0 just to give you a little extra resistance to better simulate the effect of wind resistance when you run for real.

My workout this morning looked like this:

1.5 miles @ 8:30
1 mile @ 6:40, 2 minute walk
1 mile @ 6:40, 3 minute walk
1 mile @ 6:40, 2 minute walk
.5 mile @ 8:30

Here's the thing: My workout program calls for 1600M @ 6:41, and 1 mile is actually 1609 meters. This means that I'm normally running around a 6:45 pace during my speed workouts. Today I did 6:40's. I figured that I needed to make up for the fact that I was on a treadmill, and didn't have to push myself as hard mentally to keep running. That's not to say that the workout wasn't hard... it was REALLY hard. That last mile was brutal, and the "just quit, you've done enough" voice was VERY loud in my brain towards the end. I just focused on my breathing and kept repeating to myself, "It's just six minutes and forty seconds... two songs on the iPod..."

Now that the speed workout is out of the way, I can cross-train tomorrow, and then (oh joy!) do the LT run on Thursday. I haven't completed that workout yet, so let's hope that my energy surge can hold up throughout the week.