Archive for December 23rd, 2008

I was bored last night, so I stuck my Spring goal race into this little date calculator to see when I need to start training  and wowza!  January 11 will be 16 weeks from the Lehigh Valley Half.   Time to start thinking about it.

So then I’m looking at all my books, wondering what training plan I want to follow and not getting excited by any.  Most of them are shy on the quality work, when I know I can handle two a week and Daniels doesn’t even have a dedicated Half schedule, he says you can use the Marathon one, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea.

Just as I was making the decision to roll my own, swiping a few workouts from this plan and that, I took a second look at my new book, Brad Hudson’s Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon, recommended by a few people I respect on the Marathon Training forum.

I had only glanced at the plans, but now that I was giving it my full attention, the more I liked what I saw.  Hudson’s plans have quite a bit more work in them than Pfitzinger, Glover and the rest.  All the long runs are progression runs, he’s big on hill reps as a strengthener and injury prevention, there’s fartlek sprinkled throughout (which I thought was lame when I first looked at it, but now looks appetizing enough)…

In a nutshell, it has lots of variety, looks like it would bring some substantial rewards speed-wise and most importantly, looks fun!

It’s a cool book in general, he espouses adaptive training;  instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you use what works for you and drop what doesn’t.  He also recommends changing your training from season to season to keep the training effect fresh.  The focus is in making you an effective, intuitive self-coach.

What I find super attractive in the plan are those progression Long Runs.  You know I loved Pfitzinger and appreciated that he got me safely to the start line in October, but it wasn’t much a of a push for me, I became used to putting the brakes on for LRs, avoiding a great opportunity for extra improvement.  The way Brad Hudson says “if you can add some quality into your easy runs, why not do it?” makes a lot of sense to me.  I’d been under the assumption that easy must be easy, hard must be hard, but Hudson gives you a middle layer, too.

So I’m in!  Two and a half weeks of freeform ahead and then the new plan begins.

As for the present, the holidays are about to finally do their thing and tomorrow morning, we’ll be leaving for a couple days.  While I’m gone, I may pretend to not have internet access in an attempt to act mentally healthy and be all woodsy-natural, but that’s like trying to keep Amy Winehouse away from the crack pipe, so I’m not confident about it.  Especially since we’re bringing a pipe (laptop) with us.

I leave you with a twisted holiday medley from Straight No Chaser.  I read about them yesterday on CNN.  They formed at Indiana University, disbanded after school, then last year one of them put a 1998 video of themselves on YouTube, that instantly went viral.  Now they’ve got a record deal.  I love stories like that.  Enjoy!

Merry Xmas, Chappy Chanukah and Krazy Kool Kwanzaa to you all!