Michael: Consistency, Endurance, Novelty and Improvement

Lemon tail feathers,
Black body and yellow beak-
Oropendola.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Today we were suppose to return to the Quetzal trail for the first time in a couple of months. The rainy season should’ve been over and the trail decent enough to make it a challenging run instead of a warrior slog through mud, slippery rocks, broken stairs and downed trees. But it hasn’t stopped raining just yet. In fact it rained hard last night and is still at it right now, so we decided to reschedule for next week.

So instead of sliding outside I’ll be sliding inside on my slide board then do a kettle bell workout. With the rest of time that’s freed up from not spending 5 or so hours away from home, I’m going to think about working out hard and what I need to do to improve my  performance for next year.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the adage, “Only a fool expects to obtain different results by doing the same thing over and over.” As that pertains to distance running, I believe that means just going longer and longer at the same pace is only going to take me so far.

So this year I’m going to mix it up, but not with a grab bag of random workouts. The way to go, I feel, is to throw in some novelty that’s anchored by a consistently progressive framework.

To that end I’m going to do speedwork twice a week; once on the flats and the other on a hill. Each month I’ll do progressively longer pick ups beginning with 1 minute hard efforts increasing a minute per month. Within the month, however, as a way of measuring my improvement and determining the effects of my training, I’ll alternate between one week of the increasing speedwork with a week of one minute flat/hill workouts whose parameters won’t change except, hopefully, I’ll be able to eek out a little bit more distance per minute every month within that hard minute of running.

Regardless of the value of mixing things up once in a while, it’ll still be a joy to get back out on our old reliable trails, like the Quetzal, if and when it ever stops raining here.