I've wanted to share this weeks ago and keep telling my friends I would post it so I finally got around to it now.
I'm average at best for a Let's Run poster. I typically run a road 5k in 17:30 - 18:00 but I love to compete and try to get the best out of myself by working hard in training.
So I was really getting bored of training and I was looking for a way to make it fun. My idea was to take the book "Running with the Buffaloes" and do everything that the team did. The schedule goes for 14 weeks in the book and then the championship race on the Monday.
I have three weeks to go. I basically followed the schedule with a few changes. I live in a somewhat flat area so the big mountain runs early on in the schedule I ran the uphill portions on a treadmill. The downhill parts of those runs I could not do much about. Most of the Mondays that the athletes ran on their own were not documented so I did an easy day of running or sometimes took the day off. I substituted a couple of workouts for races and then ran those workouts when the team raced instead.
When Wetmore told the team to go easy I ran easy. Sometimes the guys in the book went a little too hard on those days and most of those guys had an injury along the way. I'm happy to say I was not hurt during the schedule but I think a lot of it has to do with coming off a fall marathon so my base was 80-100 miles per week going into the training. I also do a lot of hip strengthening, dynamic stretching, and core work for injury prevention.
Taking the "on your own days" easy or off which included some Thursdays as well in the last month the mileage was only 60-70 miles per week.
The good news for me is I'm over 40 and I'm very close to running the times I ran when I was 18. At the end of the schedule is a 5k race on February 1st so hopefully if the weather cooperates I'll have a good shot to go under 17 which I have not done in years. I've raced three times since starting the schedule and I'm faster than I've been for a long time.
Anyway, I thought I would share this. I would recommend it for someone that was getting bored of the same old grind. The great thing about it is I really don't have to think too hard about what I'm doing day to day in training and I was at the point where I wasn't going to train anymore anyway so I had nothing to lose. The focus places the goal on the training and not the race.