Finally, a good week

I guess BayState rebooted my system because I had a great week of running.  Except for one day where I did some sprints I took all of my runs nice and easy, consciously making myself slow down.  I took to just getting out and letting the run go where it would go.  Some times I wasn't even sure how long I was going to go, I just figured it out on the road.  It was a nice change of pace to just get out and enjoy, it's been awhile since I've done that.

Throughout my training I have become obsessed with pace.  I always had to check what my pace was and where I felt I should be if it was too slow.  Every day I would start a run wondering if it would be faster than the day before.  Faster, faster, faster; but with no real goal behind it.  It didn't matter if I was doing it for a purpose, the pace was all that mattered.  After all, to get a 3:15 marathon I have to run a 7:26 pace; a 90 minute half is a 6:51; a 18:30 5K is 5:57 and so on.  Pace dictates the race and in turn dictates the training.

Or so I believed.

But I have realized that I have been doing it all wrong.  My training programs have been fatally flawed from the very beginning but I never even realized it.  Even when I would come down with an injury I always blamed the increase in distance as the culprit.  So I would cut back on the mileage in the hopes of recovering but when I continued to get injured after the decrease I had no explanation.  Because I never took what the pace I was running at into consideration.  I would barely cut back on the speed.

I have finally come to realize that I was wholly focused on mileage as the only benchmark for my training instead of basing it on workload.  Simply put, workload=(volume x intensity).  While this is rather intuitive I had failed to take this simple concept and apply it.  As my training progressed and I added mileage to my weekly workouts I was also adding an increase in speed at the same time.  While in my head I was progressing in a linear fashion my workload was actually increasing exponentially.  My training progress should have looked like this:

 But instead it has actually looked like this:

Which explains a lot. Too much, too soon.  In the future I am definitely going to take this into consideration and use what I have learned.  If the mileage goes up the speed needs to stay the same, and vice-versa.  Run smarter.

For now I am going to take some advice many people have given me; stop over-thinking, relax, enjoy, and run what I feel, not what I feel like I must.