I'm almost afraid to say that, for fear of jinxing myself, but wow, have I had some really, really great long Sunday runs. The weather has been perfect. The paces I was expecting of myself over the summer are coming very easily now and I guess it just goes to show how much the heat was impacting things over summer. I mean, I'm running half marathon pace or better and it feels easy, even slow. I definitely have to remember that for next year if I find myself being frustrated by training pace in summer.
Did a lot of thinking on the run about, well, running, my goals/intentions for next year, and Maximum Strength. I guess I was selectively forgetting some aspects of the training plan there for a while, as I had intended to keep up running on the non-lifting days of the program (Tuesday and Thursday and possibly Sunday, if I felt itchy) to the extent practicable over the winter to avoid having to do a complete re-start-up next spring. And as I said in my last post, I understand why he doesn't want a person to do this (heck, we're currently studying muscles in A&P and have just recently gone over physiological response of various types of skeletal muscle fibers to different types of exercise). Which all generates the following random thoughts, which I'm not even trying to reconcile at the moment:
- Speaking purely as a science type person, I enjoy doing programs as written just to see what, exactly, a particular protocol will do to/for me. I mean, how else do you know?
- I am a believer of beginning with the end in mind, that is, having a goal, even if it's just to see what a training protocol will do for you. Again, how else do you know?
- That all said, I also believe there are no rotation/program police, and there's no law that says you actually have to follow a program exactly, particularly if you have an overarching goal that isn't the same as the program goal, and yet the program compliments your goal. SEE what I've been doing with FBB. I sure as hell haven't been following the program but I believe the workouts have served me very well.
- I love running. I think of myself as a lot of things, but "runner" usually comes out first.
All of which probably sounds like I'm trying to justify doing what I want to do - that is, running through MS. And yet while I was running, I was trying to figure out a way I could convince myself to NOT do that, to run the pure experiment - and then in another turn of the mind, I wondered why I felt the need to do the pure experiment in the first place. Which lead me to goals for next year, which lead me to a schedule for next year... yeah. Thought soup.
I suppose I could do MS the way I want to and just accept that I'm compromising the experiment and may not achieve the best possible outcome - at least until winter dictates exactly how much running I'll be doing through the ugly months, anyway. If this winter is like last winter, that will be very little; OTOH, in a typical year, a person might miss a week here and there but be able to keep up some semblance of a schedule.
I don't know. I haven't made a decision either way and probably won't until I have to, which isn't until next month. Between now and then I should pick out a key race for next year and backfill from there.
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