Friday Training Update

Two of the books I've read over the past couple of weeks include Run: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel and Eat & Run.  Both books were chock-full of useful information and insight into how I can improve my running and ultimately, run happier.  In this day and age, everyone seems to be so consumed with acquiring more data about their training: GPS maps, heart rate training zones, VO2 max, lactate thresholds, gait analysis, etc.  What both books advocate is (to some degree) ignore all of these things and just go run.  Listen to your body and the feedback it's giving you - this will generally be more relevant and applicable than if you looked at your heart rate monitor and saw you were training at 75% of your heart rate reserve.  Running in the moment, and not getting second-by-second feedback on pacing and heart rate, helps your body to find it's natural cadence much better than constantly trying to make adjustments based on empiric evidence of how you are running.  So most of this week, I've tried to not pay any attention to my iPhone while running and I just ran.

One discovery I've made this week is that when I set my Nike+ GPS app and don't check it again until I feel I want to stop, I almost always have gone one hour and traversed somewhere between 7.3 and 7.5 miles. This has happened a few times in the last week or two, and I'm sure it's occurring in part because I haven't been setting any goal distances for runs, as I'm not really in training mode for a race yet.  Yesterday, however, I had set a goal distance of 10 miles.  At a certain point in my run, I felt like I was dragging a little bit.  I checked my iPhone just to see where I was in my run.  Sure enough, I was 58 minutes and a little over 7 miles in.  Once I reminded myself that I had set a goal for myself that day, I found that the rest of the run was easy.  I think it was an important discovery though; I could run for an hour a day and my body wouldn't really rebel at all, but when I try and push my training past that point, I'll need a little mental coaxing to get beyond the point where my body feels comfortable going.  As I get in better shape, I'm hoping that this point will happen later and later in workouts, and I'll be accustomed to running greater distances with regularity.