My far-flung friend Conor, a buddy from both Cate and Vanderbilt who now lives in Paris, calls me after races to ask how things went. This is very nice of him. Conor wasn't much of a runner when I knew him, but something clicked in France for him, and now he's a turbo marathoner and triathlete. He's very committed to training and clocks extremely impressive times. I love talking shop with him. During our conversation after my marathon, after affectionately (I think) berating me for running a really stupid race, he recommended a book called Run Less, Run Faster. Conor's had knee problems, too, and he said this book has slashed minutes from his race times while taking a lot of the strain off his knees. He swears by it. Intrigued, I bought a copy.
Within the first three pages, I had received a second berating for running a stupid race. The authors explained exactly why I shouldn't have done what I did as well as providing justification for running a solidly paced race. I knew this, but had never had it explained in this way and it hit home immediately.
The premise of the book is that you do three running workouts a week, two of which are really pretty short. Workout #1 is always a series of timed intervals. These are fast, but not too long. For example, last Tuesday I ran intervals of 1200, 1000, 800, 600, 400, and 200 meters at the pace I'd have run if I were doing 6:20 miles and then I was DONE. Workout #2 is always a pretty short distance, again at a pretty quick pace. Last Thursday I will do five miles at 7:30 per mile and this week I will do three miles at 7:15. Workout #3 is longer but, again, faster than I'd normally go. I was scheduled to do nine miles on Saturday - can't remember the pace, but it was something like 8:00 - but instead I ran a 10k race with a two mile warm-up. Eh, close enough. The books is full of charts and tables. You pick your target race time, and it tells you exactly which workouts to do and how fast to do them. This is great for those of us that are, ahem, math averse. I find it easy to stay on pace for the intervals - in fact, I generally finish faster than I'm supposed to. I have a really tough time with the mid- and longer-distance tempo runs, though. It's a work in progress.
Cross-training is the other half of the equation. Twice a week I can choose between half an hour of cycling, swimming, rowing, time on an elliptical machine, or just about anything else that spares my knees while still getting my heart rate up. My favorite of these is swimming. Running can get a bit, well, tiresome occasionally. No matter how good the audiobook, you're still plodding along the same few routes. I am loving the variety in this plan, however.
If you add it up, it's not a lot of mileage for a half-marathon. However, I find myself much more tired than I was after longer workouts in preparation for previous half-marathons because the pace is so much faster than I'm used to. I generally do whichever workout I've scheduled for the day in the morning, and because they're short I have plenty of time to finish, shower, and get to work. I really like this schedule. I have more energy during the day, and it leaves my evenings open to meet friends for dinner, run errands, or just relax. (Plus it's too bloody hot to run after work...) My knees have both felt great throughout this first month of training - although the one I fell on a few months ago still has a rather large lump of unattractive scar tissue below the joint - and I can already tell that I'm getting faster.
I'll get to test my mettle in about two more months, when I'm scheduled to be done with my workouts and will run the Bronx (Staten Island?) Half. In the meantime, more early morning workouts interspersed with shorter races to get me to my total of nine for 2011!
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