KudzuRunner wrote:
Ed:
For the (extremely) interested among us who missed the earlier thread and have stumbled across bits and pieces of your training regimen in various publications, would you mind summarizing, in as brief or extended a form as you're inclined to, what your weekly schedule looks like?
My understanding is that your daily run, pretty much every day, consists of three hours at an easy pace on a paved loop in a local park (or cemetary??).
Is that correct? Three hours a day? At roughly what pace? Does your pace vary in the course of such runs--a brisker last hour or two, for example? Do you ever run shorter recovery jogs? Intervals? Fartlek? Marathon-pace efforts?
As with most runners I suppose training changes over a period of time. When I was in my 40,s I did mainly interval training with a fair amount of brisk distance work. Maybe a 50/50 mix. I was concentrating on middle distance running. Achilles tendon problems caused me to gradually do less and less interval workouts. It has reached the point now that I don't do any workouts on a track.
My training is now done on the roads of a small cemetary on a circuit of about 1/3 mile, mostly in shade. The current objective is to run every day year round for 3 hours at a slow comfortable pace. I don't count or time the laps I run so I don't know my pace with any accuracy. I just try to run easily and minimise impact, starting out very slowly for the first 10/15 minutes but after that not making any effort to change the pace for the remainder of the session. For the 2 or 3 days before a race I would plan to run shorter sessions maybe an hour long and include a bit of a tempo run or a quasi interval session of laps of the cemetary. I have had trouble achieving the objective this year for various reasons, nasal infections, an achilles problem and lately a knee problem. I generally just rest to get rid of these problems and then I start back gradually maybe only 10 minutes initially, if there are no new interruptions it would take at least 2 months to get back up to 3 hours. As a result of the problems I have had this year I am not going to have any extended period of 3 hour runs before the Toronto Waterfront marathon on the 24th September, so I will have to scale back my ambitions accordingly. Although there has been talk of a 3 hour possibility my realistic objective will be more modest than that and the pacing plan will preclude sub 3.