The Monday 12

By -

Today marks my first day back into training. The ankle is not totally healed, but it's good to go for easy running.

It's fitting that the first day back will be the standard Monday 12 with the boys. The Monday 12 is about as far from a workout as you can get. There's nothing intense about it. It's not a long run. It's not a tempo. It's not a workout. It's a jog with a couple friends.

But if there is a secret to my training, it's encapsulated by the values of Monday 12. The Monday 12 is all about sustainability. There is a tendency to overemphasize the value of the runs that push the envelope. Those long runs, those fast runs. The runs where you grit your teeth and dig for new capacities. These have a place in training, for sure.

But training, like life, is mostly made up of runs like the Monday 12. The runs that don't do anything special. They don't serve any particular purpose. They don't prove anything in particular. You can't brag about them to your friends or your neighbors. They're just the runs you do because you're a runner.

They say that the test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching. In the days of the online running log and blogs and facebook and all that, you can make yourself believe that someone is watching at every moment. And they pretty much are, even if it's just as a distraction from whatever it is they should be doing. This sense that we are being watched can make training itself into a kind of race--who's got the most miles? Who did the sickest workout?

The Monday 12 is an antidote to all of that visibility. It's a run that accomplishes nothing, means nothing in itself. It's ordinary. It's just what I do, what I am. And for that very reason, it's the secret to it all.

On Monday afternoon the runners get together, and they run.

Comments

  1. The ThunderMarch 1, 2010 at 3:43 PM

    LOS says, "Let's do this thing".

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM

    They're just the runs you do because you're a runner.

    Perfect.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Is an Easy Run?

By -
Image
What is an easy run? Well, most basically, it's a run that's easy to accomplish. It's the backbone of training. It's the run that makes every other run possible. For some runners, this is all that needs to be said. But for a lot of other runners, especially new runners or runners who are entering a new stage of fitness, the concept of "easy" can be somewhat elusive. Heck, if you are really out of shape, there's no such thing as an easy run because nothing feels easy. That said, I think there are a few things I can say about easy running that will help new runners and experienced runners alike, mostly because I think that most people -- believe it or not -- can do their easy running better. The place to start when looking to understand what an easy run is and how it works in training is to think about what it's not. An easy run is not a workout, which means that it's not a couple more things: it's not structured or planned or focused
Read more

Eulogy for a Great Coach: Van Townsend

By -
"...if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth "wind" may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points." -- William James, "The Energies of Men" Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most stran
Read more

Hansons' Marathon Method and Pfitzinger's Advanced Marathoning -- the two aspects of marathon training

By -
On the message boards at RunningAhead, there have been a ton of recent threads about the new Hanson's Marathon Method , most of them comparing it with Pfitz' "old reliable" Advanced Marathoning.  One of the smartest posters on the board (the guy solves Rubik's Cubes while marathoning) bhearn put together a comparison of the different marathon approaches that is truly excellent. If you are looking to get more intelligent about your marathon training, bhearn's summary of the similarities and differences in these two fundamentally sound approaches wouldn't be the worst place to start. The most interesting aspect of bhearn's analysis is his comparison of the total mileage done at various intensities in the two plans over the course of a training cycle. He breaks it down in terms of the classic physiological moments of VO2max, Lactic Threshold, and MP (sometimes called Aerobic Threshold.) I am stealing his chart and pasting it below: Hansons Pfitzinge
Read more