I haven’t really posted about my training in a while or where I want it to go. Or the fact that I am not being coached by anyone right now (I would have thought people would have assumed) but there it is all out in the open like that. I am still on good terms with my coach, I just don’t have really anything I’m balls to the wall training for. It’s not cross country season, it’s not the Olympics…quite frankly I’m just running with absolutely no focus and enjoying the journey to go there.
And you know what?
I’m really enjoying how my running is going right now. I have absolutely no pressure to do anything (not that I ever had pressure beforehand) but now I have even less pressure. I’ve always been one (even being coached) to fly by the seat of pants. I normally have always had a rough outline of what sort of runs and workouts I wanted to do for the week, but have a Monday: 6.45 miles, Tuesday: 12.69 miles at 8:02 pace…ect type of log? I don’t think so. Ever.
For instance during a training week my thoughts normally begin like this: This week I’ll attempt to run between 70-75 miles with five miles of speed somewhere in there…is it a race…maybe or just some tempoish miles. That is the extent of my scheduling and planning.
So does this really help me?
I have actually found that it does and it does a lot. First of all, I’m not obsessed with pace. I don’t care. I could run 10 miles at 10 minute pace or 10 miles at 8 minute pace. It’s still 10 base miles.
When talking with a fellow runner, I realized that it hasn’t always been that way for me. I haven’t always been not obsessed with pace and numbers. There was a point in my running career that I would run in the same 10 second pace range for every run of the week. That pace was between 7-7:10. All that did was make me injured. I never got much faster and I was miserable the entire time. I was so antsy if my overall pace was 7:11 or more and thought I had loss my all endurance…sounds silly now but that is what the new runner in me thought. Train fast to go fast. Race myself everyday.
In fact during that particular time of my running career, my 5k PR was 20:10.
Now it’s 18:57 and I run 75% of my runs above an 8:30 pace.
My half marathon PR then was 1:36.56…now it’s 1:27.17.
So for me, not caring about pace has turned into continuing to improve on running. I can’t tell anyone how to train and what works for them and nor do I want too. I’m telling you how liberating it is for me to be carefree about pace.
What it took for me to get to that point isn’t easy and honestly, without being injured I don’t think I would have gotten here. I truly learned my body is not going to respond well to fast runs everyday and it will be injured.
I think I should have renamed my blog CasualLOLZ or something.
Questions for you:
What are your thoughts?
Do you schedule workouts everyday or fly by the seat of your pants?