New Training Program

Since I haven't posted anything is a little while, I figured I was due to get something up here. As I noted in my previous post, I decided to hire a coach this fall and start a more regimented training program. I decided to go with Paul O'Callaghan who is a former Irish international runner with some stunning racing history and personal bests. He qualified for the 1988 Olympic Games and has competed in a total of 6 World XC Championships. It made since to me that someone with such a stellar running career would know something about what works and what doesn't.

I'm now on my second week of the new training program. The basic program calls for 7 days on, 1 day off. The idea of having a rotating day off is to avoid your body from getting used to have the same day off each week and therefore starting to anticipate getting that break. At first I was a bit worried that having to run so many days in a row since would leave me constantly fatigued and unable to get quality workouts in as I was used to running only 4-5 days a week. However, once I saw the schedule, I realized that it wasn't going to be too bad. While it calls for a lot of days in a row, only 2 of the days are hard workouts, the rest are generally pretty easy, with some days with only calling for an easy 20 minute run.

The main hard workout is the now somewhat infamous "O'Cal 10 Miler." which usually consists of a hard hilly tempo one in the Broadmead area. The first time I did this route, the skies opened up and dumped on us the entire time so we got completely soaked - quite the nice initiation! I was eased into the course though as Paul had Jairus Streight show me how to navigate the route and we ran at a fairly relaxed pace. Last week we did the 10 Miler on the last 16k of the RVM Half Marathon route. At this time, I ran with Eric Findlay, Sean Chester, and Shawn Nelson, all of whom are currently faster runners. We went out pretty hard and after about 15 minute I wondered if I was going to be able to survive the hectic pace. I stayed close to all 3 of them until around 8km when I relaxed just a bit. Once I got into my groove, I was actually able to feel pretty strong for the remainder of the run. I finished around 58min which is pretty solid for a training run for me. Having others to chase during is definitely going to help me in the upcoming months.

This Wednesday there will be no tempo run for me. Instead I'm going to be running the Thetis 20K Relay solo for the first time. Getting my pacing right so I don't die on the last lap is critical.