Change of Pace

I hit the five hundred mark on the nose today as I squeezed my run into the hour of sun we got between the morning's rain storm and snow storm. Springtime always brings weird weather and today is no exception. It's sunny again right now, but the odds of that lasting very long are probably slim. 500 miles, and we're only just past the quarter-year mark, so I'm still very much on track to finally hit 2,000 miles by December 31, 2006.

I snapped a shot this morning to illustrate the vein development that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. A couple of the guys responded to that post with typical male grunting and chest-beating about how awesome pop-out veins are, but I'm still feeling a little weirded out by them. Do any of the women out there get these when they up their mileage? And continuing on the mileage theme, the current training plan involves inching my way up to a 60/week base, backing off for recovery every third week to 35 miles or so.

It has actually become difficult to restrict myself to that level of mileage. Even if I take tomorrow, Friday and Saturday off completely, I'm planning on doing fifteen on Sunday which will give me 37 for the week. I'm not taking three days off in a row, so I guess my "easy week" will still end up being close to fifty. That's actually pretty cool when you get to the point where you can run fifty miles in a week without even trying.

Sunday is a team points four-miler, so doing a few easy days leading up to that isn't a bad thing. I haven't been doing much in the way of speed work, so I'll be surprised if I break my PR, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be pleased as punch by that outcome if it does happen.