Training with purpose

There's nothing more rewarding as a runner than seeing and feeling the results of training. As any competitive runner knows, there's a huge difference between just running and training. Through much of my summer and fall I was running a lot, but I was training very little. After taking a break in December, I committed to a smarter training program starting in 2008. The first couple weeks after taking a break felt tough. But now after a month or so of solid base mileage, I'm feeling really great and ready to go. I've been slower to introduce my typical January threshold runs around Green Lake. Instead, based on an article by Greg McMillan in Running Times, I've opted to do once or twice weekly sub-threshold runs. These runs are described as those which are 15-20 seconds slower than lactate threshold pace. The argument of the article was, and I've experienced this myself, that true tempo/threshold runs can cause a runner to peak too early in the season. Considering my peak race (Western States) isn't until late June, I have pushed back my true threshold workouts until later this month and have opted to incorporate 6-8 weeks of sub-threshold workouts instead. So far so good, but it'll be interesting to start racing in March without 2 months of threshold workouts in the bag.