My running life is about to flip on its head.

As mentioned before, I have a 5k in 4 weeks, my first 5K since last April.  In order to do the best I can for it, I have to change my modus operandi.  The multi-hour runs of marathon training don’t fit in a 5K plan, and even my medium long runs are too long for optimizing this distance.  Last night, I compared Pfitz, Glover & Higdon 5K advanced plans (the last 4 weeks, since that’s where I’m jumping in) and while Pfitz allows a 10-miler this week, the highest he goes for the next three weeks is 9 miles.  Higdon builds to a high of a 90-minute run the week before the race, while Glover would have me do 8, tops.  Wow.

It’s a weird feeling.  When you’re on a steady diet of one long and one medium long, every week for half a year, it becomes the “way you run” and part of how you identify yourself.  You become a marathoner.  How strange now, to let that go. Kind of sad, actually.

What’s even weirder is that I just looked back at my logs and realized I’ve been running long runs (and mediums, as Pfitz would define) since all the way back to June 2007, when I began training for my first Half.  No wonder I’m feeling off-kilter about shelving them, even if it is for a mere 4 weeks.

The Pfitz 5K schedule is a nice frame, skeletal really (he gives you the quality work for the week and you figure out the rest), but I’ve been having tempo run urges lately (yeah, I can’t believe it either) and Pfitz doesn’t include any in the last 4 weeks of his plan.  He does, however, call for a 2-mile race in a couple weeks (oh yeah, there’s always a 2-mile race going on somewhere!) but even if I was to do a 2-mile time trial, that just sounds like a painfully unfun run to me, so I’ll be replacing it with a 4-mile tempo run.

As for weekly mileage, I’m not willing to see it shrink much, even if I am having a temporary 5K flirtation.   To make it work with the shorter runs, I’ll be going back to 6-day running weeks, same as I was doing before marathon training.

So blindly I tread into this new phase, trying not to mourn the loss of long runs or worrying that my endurance is about to die a nasty death.  Instead, I must Trust.  Trust that my inner speed demon will rise to the surface this month and reward me with a shiny new PR for my trouble.

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