I've griped in the past about having my runs arbitrarily rerouted due to some obscure film or Japanese documentary being entrenched along Dakota section of the bridle path, but there seemed to be some odd doings indeed gong on there today. They detoured us pedestrian quite a ways away from the action, but there seemed to be a blood smeared horse in carriage harness and a bunch of firemen involved. I thought for a moment that it might be a real emergency incident before I spotted the big light reflectors and cameras and realized that it must instead all be for a porn film. Alas, I was mistaken yet again. At the end of my run ,I overtook an artsy looking, bohemian dude trotting along home on the crimson streaked carriage horse and he told methey'd been filming for the television show Rescue Me. I'm vaguely aware of Denis O'Leary being in that, but I've never seen it.
All that was vaguely amusing, but more significant for me today was the addition of a little speed work to my routine. Although I was pleased that my time in Brooklyn was a respectable one and it certainly could have been a real disaster, it was still frustrating to me that I ran it slower than last year, despite training much harder. Just look at this year's mileage compared to last's: (and for fun, last year compared to 2004)
At that's with a taper before the race, albeit an unintended one.
I stewed over this a bit before finally turning to a new running book that I bought a few months ago and still hadn't cracked open. The currently delinquent running blogger Kevin Beck compiled a book of twelve essays covering a nice selection of distance running basics, from stretches to improve range of motion to a basic how-to guide to designing an efficient training plan. The book is called Run Strong and after finally giving it a good look over, I do think it's a very practical, useful guide for most of the runners I know who read this blog.
Anyway, I zeroed in on that chapter about building a training plan and found a wealth of enlightening information. It's written by the distance coach Joe Rubio and he references the four essential training zones featured in the book Better Training for Distance Runners. Aerobic and Anaerobic conditioning and Aerobic and Anaerobic capacity. He goes into great detail about how each of these should be integrated into a training routine and to what extent, but it did hit me that I've been doing all of my training (outside of races) in exactly one of these zones. I'm not too worried about this and actually, according to the whole Lydiard way of thinking, by just focusing on building my aerobic base, I'm doing exactly what I should be for a fall marathon. I'm just not going to be seeing results quite yet when I compete the shorter races.
I'm still planning on sticking with what I have been doing, building up my mileage and bolstering that aerobic conditioning, but I think I'm also going to start integrating a workout from each of the other three zones once a week, rotating through each of the types of training every three weeks. As I move into the summer I'll add in a few more of these workouts, but for right now I just want to experiment to see what adding in just a little will do for me in the upcoming April club points races, a four-miler and another half.
For the record, today I did strides, which Rubio would classify as an anaerobic conditioning workout. I actually culled this workout from Greg McMillan's Creating Raw Speed chapter in the book. I warmed up for 20 minutes then ran eight 30 second strides at about 85-90% with about 2-3 minutes slow jogging rest in between, then another 20 minutes cool down.