Taper Time

So. It’s been awhile since I’ve been on here. But now I’m back. Just picking up as if I never left off. Like old friends.

I may not have been blogging for the past month or so, but I’ve been running. Mileage-wise, my last four weeks have all been 90k or more. No injuries (knock on digital wood). And the workouts have felt good. I’m not sure how fast they’ve been, though, because I’m trying a new approach to workouts: running by time and feel rather than forcing the splits. Alex and I started doing this last month in Shubie – we set a watch alarm for 2min and then did 4min hard effort, 2min recovery for a total of 6 hard efforts. No data, just hard running.

I have no idea if this will get results, but I’ve been loving it – so much so that I now do my short and fast stuff the same way. The four-minute stuff is on Wednesdays (I think of it as a VO2 max workout) – on Saturdays, I now do minute-ers: one minute fast, one minute recovery, for a total of 8 fast minutes. I think of this as what Cliff would call a 1500m pace workout, which we usually do on the track with some combination of 200s and 400s. The minute is somewhere in between... hopefully much closer to the 400m than the 200m mark. But the thing is that I have no idea – I just warm up, set my watch alarm to 1 min, get on the road and go. I do them up or down hills, wherever I am when the watch goes. In a way, these time-based, effort-based workouts are like structured fartleks but with a specific effort level in mind for each workout.

I’ve been piling on the miles and the hard efforts in preparation for the Nova Scotia Half Marathon, which goes down in Barrington Passage on the 24th. I’m really excited for this race because I have no idea what to expect. I feel fit, but I may not be fast – who knows? One thing about last year’s season was that from start to finish, I knew exactly what kinds of times I was going to run. By the end of the season, races were a little boring because I was simply maintaining my fitness, not pushing it further. But with fewer races this season, I’ve had time to experiment with training techniques – and I’ll see if this latest one works.

With less than a week and a half to the race, I’m now in taper. My legs are tired, but there’s plenty of time to get them back. The work is in the tank – I just need to be patient, run easy, and then let loose when the gun goes.

It’s nice to be back...