Monday, November 12, 2007

My body still hasn't caught up to the time change

After a good weekend of running, I decided to take today off. It was a toss-up between doing an hour of weights or an hour on the stationary bike and I opted for the bike today.
As good as I feel when I do weights, there's something about working my heart that I enjoy more.

I've found that since the clocks went back an hour, I'm having a difficult time staying up past 9 PM. I also seem to get up at hours such as 3 or 4 in the morning thinking that it's later than it is. Hopefully this will get corrected sooner than later.

Right now, as I wait until my 50 Mile training program starts in January, the goals for me are to stay healthy and try not to overdue my running. Most of the programs that I've seen online recommend starting out very slowly and that will be difficult for me. The first week has the mileage anywhere from 15 to 20 Miles per week. I realized that this past week I ran over 40 miles so I'll need to make sure that I don't burn out before my training program starts.

There are a few things I'm going to start to do differently and that is train in Miles instead of KM's and also the amount of time spent running instead of my average pace. The other thing that will be the hardest for me is to learn how to take long walk breaks.

Training in Miles just makes sense since the race will be marked in Miles. When I did my marathon in Jacksonville Florida I found that I was constantly trying to do the conversion of KM's to Miles in my head.

Utilizing time spent running instead of just running for a certain distance will also help to prepare me to run the 50 Miler. For example, one of the programs calls for running 2 Hours on Saturday and 3 Hours on Sunday. It doesn't matter what speed I go because the objective is to prepare my body to run for long periods of time. This will help keep my speed down as I won't want to run too fast for fear of burning out.

Several of the runners who I know who have successfully done multiple Ultra Marathons utilize the 20 minute running, 5 minute walking philosophy.
I've never attempted this type of training but it's hard to argue with what has worked for them. Taking 5 minute walk breaks when I usually struggle to take even 1 minute, will be one of the hardest things I'll do.

I'm lucky that I have friends who have completed many 50 Milers so I'll be leaning on them for support during my training.

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