procrastinators, it's time!

Dear bears, and chickens, and things,

Is Houston! Is Marathon! Is Time!

If you were procrastinating like me, I think it's safe to say that your free time is up. If you were thinking you were going to run in the Houston Marathon, or Half Marathon this year, it's now four months away and the hobbyjogging needs to get focused into something more disciplined.

I had this revelation about a week ago and started planning and looking at some schedules (and running more often of course) and it seems the marathon bug has made a complete recovery. One clue to that is that I'm reading about plans and blogging about running right now, and it's like 1AM in the morning.

I ran four times this week, which is the most for a couple months, and the cobwebs are becoming loosened and things are starting to float along like its supposed to. I've decided to try a new type of training plan, from the Hanson running group in Michigan. You can find it on their site : http://hansons-running.com/ or you can just look below:



As you can see, there's a lack of long long runs, with nothing over 16 miles, but looking at it, it doesn't seem like that makes it an easy plan. The Hanson guys say that physiologically there's nothing magical about the 20 miler, and you can improve the same way with intelligent strength and tempo training. We'll see. It's quite different than the approach I took last year, which was to run more and more, lots of easy miles, running everyday, if you recall, for over 6 months. At the end, I ran what I thought to be a very nice 4:17 marathon. So I plan a lot more 'quality' work this time. But this schedule also gets up to about 50 miles a week, so while there's no 20 miler, there's still a lot of miles, so it's not a clean quality v. quantity experiment.

But I'm excited about it, and it's nice to have that back.

Keith out.