my new current running goal is, oddly, my old current running goal. maybe it's my always current running goal? anyway: it's three runs a week. one tempo, one somehow hard, and one long. the somehow hard is supposed to include hills or speed or something.
in the last week, i've run three times. so, that's good.
did those three runs fit the criterion? ... er, no.
they were, instead, exactly the same run: 45-50 minutes, at a moderate but not easy pace.
they were all different places -- different times of day, different towns, different elevation profiles -- but i gotta tell you, it's hard to find an actual hill in mid-michigan, so i wouldn't describe any of them as actually hilly. (ann arbor does have real hills, but they overlap with the strangely large part of town that's dramatically underlit, so this time of year you can't do hill after 5pm without breaking your neck.) so -- ok, that's some running, but that's not actually what is required.
the thing is: they felt extremely different. on saturday, running 45-50 minutes at that pace felt like damn fool hard work. today, that same distance and pace, with rather more hills, felt like swimming along in running butter, and when i finished i felt i had done no work and should do it agian. ... this is a tricky thing about training -- when to push, when to cruise for better results next time, when to listen to your lungs vs. your legs vs. your brain. ... yeah, almost never listen to your brain.
anyway. i'm one for two. we'll call today's run the 'hard' one, insofar as they were inclines. thursday, i will get up before teaching and run faster! and saturday, i will run for longer than the damn 45-50 minutes! and then next week i'll do it again.
i have two 2017 goal races right now: one in february and one in march. but i'm not going to let myself start planning for them for real until i convince myself i'm going to do the real training thing, not the fake three-same-runs-a-week thing. so (if you're here to begin with)... stay tuned.
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