Running Book

Back when I did the Women's 4-miler training program, one of the items they gave us on the first day was a book called "Run for Life." I read through initially but really didn't make much away from it since it seemed to be either common sense (stay hydrated) or beyond me (improving your pace). At that time all I wanted to do was to complete the 4-miler... running was not going to be for life. It was just something I was trying. Skip ahead many months and now I'm doing a triathlon in which I will be running 6 miles. Having taken a number of months off I started out slower and not able to run as far as in September, yet still better than last June.

I re-read the book tonight and much more of it sunk in and seemed applicable. I am going to try to start doing some of the stretches and actually try some of their suggestions about pace. I am considering getting another book about marathon motivation that a coworker recommended because it had great ways to keep yourself going for long races (which this one will seem to be for me).

Train hard, race easy

Since I'm enjoying my late night oatmeal (the reasons why are a whole separate post), I thought I'd take this time to share with you the advice I got today: "Train hard, race easy." Simply put, the training program should be harder than the actual race. Meaning that I need to increase my distance goals for all of the segments. I will not update the distances now since I believe those lengths would most likely be achieved when I'm already in the phase of combining workouts, thus a new set of goals will appear at that point anyways.

Right now I'm excited to try to knock out a few more of those current goals. Especially the swimming. I haven't really done a good measure of what I can do in that area so I want to find my baseline.