2005 Drinks to date:..113.....Miles: 162
Okay, this is not new stuff. We were popping the LSD gospel back in high school, when long slow distance only meant one measly hour of running. And I went out and bought my heart rate monitor at least three or four years ago, but I'm pretty sure I never really understood what exactly I was supposed to do with it.
Last year I started to think more about the discrepancies in my race times and what training techniques I could be utilizing to make my shorter race PRs more commensurate with my marathon PR. At the same time, I was dating another competitive runner. A novelty in my life, since I'd never had anyone encourage me to talk about my split times and eat, drink and breathe training theories 24 hours a day. The end result was that I was getting in more mileage, more track work outs and more measured, thoughtful training below my lactic acid threshold. Come the end of May, I popped off a 19:12 5K, effectively cutting 2 minutes off my previous PR and suddenly (finally!) putting my best short race time right in line with what you would predict from my 3:09 marathon PR.
So the point is, I'd like to continue this trend. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of this training philosophy, it's all in this Heart Rate Training link. But the basic guidelines to see if you're where you're supposed to be are to take your race times and compare them. Your 10K mile pace should be 15 seconds faster than your 5K pace, Half marathon pace should be 15 seconds faster than your 10K pace, marathon pace 15 seconds faster than your half, yadda, yadda, yadda...
