Mixing it Up

Since I follow a huge number of blogs and news feeds for work, I've tended to stay away from running related blogs and stuck to some of the running forums out there. However, I'm slowly being sucked into reading other folks' accounts of their running and training, and frankly it's been fascinating.

And through the intial blogs, I've come across more and more runners, both slow and fast, via links and comments, such as Jason and Leah, Chris, Mike and Greg. And I seem to be adding more feeds to Bloglines on a daily basis. Very cool, because you can learn a lot from other people's training and their drive and determination to improve is pretty contagious.

From Mike's blog, I found this Running Times about Brad Hudson, a former prep star and now coach to some of the U.S.'s top distance runners. Hudson makes some interesting points regarding his training philosphy. While the jury is still out on his coaching ability (I hope Dathan Ritzenhein can run some fast 5000s this Summer before making a successful debut at the New York City Marathon), I like his idea about mixing it up. However in my case I need a plan otherwise I'll just do the same thing over and over again.

With that in mind, I going to make sure my recovery days are easier, and try to incorporate a longer mid-week run as I get ready to start formally training in August for a December marathon.

I tried out Leah's pre-run fuelling suggestion and had a slice of homemade wheat bread with peanut butter and honey after waking up this morning. On a side note, I think I go through a jar of peanut butter every week and a half. It's definitely a post-run breakfast staple with bananas on toast.

The pre-run fuelling didn't seem to bother me as I ran about 11.35 miles. It was a pretty relaxed effort and I kept it at around 70% of max HR. Tomorrow I'm thinking of going to the track and trying to run some 200s at 800/1500m pace.

I'm still considering running an 800 metter race at next week's Pacific Association USATF Masters meet. But having done no speedwork in the past couple of months, I want to see where I stand so hence the 200s tomorrow. Common sense would be just to skip the meet, but I've never been known to have much of that....