Great stuff!
I guess if Rich is a whippet, I'm more like a labrador. I have reasonable speed when I stay fit, but can definitely pack on the pounds if left unsupervised with food available.
I, too, am really aiming to get mileage up, but for me, it seems that my time improvements have all exactly correlated with a corresponding decrease in weight that comes with more miles, since I'm not so good at the diet control thing.
We're almost done with this week and I am just getting around to posting on last week's thread. I had a good steady 55mi. last week.
A lot of good stuff posted on this week's thread. I agree that more mileage is 98% of the key to better racing. Also, keeping the excess weight off as the years go by also is critical. I certainly think that eating right is psychologically more challenging than training right. Training is mostly fun and interesting. Not eating something you want to eat is never fun or interesting.
Reeder, great running in the past few years!Seeing how it took 24 years to improve age grade by 3 or 4% I might make 90% by the time I'm 70 and another 60 years to approach 100%!I never stopped--just been knocked out some years due to injury.In college, lots of miles, lots of intervals, no recovery days (10 miles 6:30 to 7:00 were easy days), so I had some decent 2 mile and 10K times (for DIII) but never put it together for 5K. And then I didn't run 5Ks for years post college, but started focusing again in my late 20s. I think all those years of base helped with speed later on, when I did less mileage. As a master's definite correlation with mileage and time. I feel better when getting in a fair amount of volume and don't do much speedwork (minimalist approach, with striders and short workouts like 4 or 5X 400 at mile pace, maybe once a week, as my speedwork; and 5K 10K workouts are shortened
Reeder wrote:
Muddy Girl, I hear you about "less me".
All that time off made too much me, and since I have no discipline about eating it took a while to run that me away. And many weeks of tired legs with a couple of falls on trails too. I've read your postings before- you seem to have a lot of experience, so hopefully you can coax your body into this new routine.
AK-52, that was a fascinating list. I admire your consistency over the years.
It seems the mileage correlates better with your times after age 40.
And that the slowdown is not straight down. You sometimes improve from one year to the next.
I used to think it would be really tough to handle slowing down, but I find as much pleasure as ever in just running faster than last year.
Even in faster days I was a decent but not great runner, so it was always just about improvement anyway. And local improvement is enough to get me out the door. (Except today's blizzard=dreadmill.)
" I think a bit of banter would be good, probably not bashing, but a bit of cajoling when necessary"/quote
How bout a knuckle sandwich ?