The Logic of Long Distance

Two quick things to draw your attention to, then some remarks on the role of vision in training. 1) A quote from Thoreau: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. "Now put the foundations under them."   --Tho...

Last October, I promised that I would be smarter.  Tired of feeling somewhat stagnant in my training and racing, with nothing much to lose since I hadn't been improving much, I decided to move away from the concentration on loads of easy mileage and tempos. You can read the linked post for details, but basically instead of thinking of my training in terms of maximizing work, I decided to think of it in terms of maximizing the right kinds of stimuli. I also have been working with a coach to get some distance from my own training and basically give me the confidence I needed to trust my training, to back off at times and to push harder at the right moment. Since then, I've been running less (50-60mpw, no runs longer than 10-12 miles) and doing different sorts of workouts, with an emphasis on practicing fast paces rather than the kind of heavy aerobic tempoing that I'd been doing in the past. This training has worked well for me. I feel sharper and more race-ready when ...