Ladies,
My posts have gotten a bit erratic lately - sorry for that. A lot is happening behind the scenes you aren't seeing, and it seems I haven't yet developed the habit of sitting right down after practice and getting it done. I will try to do better.
Today, because of my ignorance, I missed most of practice. Coach Jo told me it went well, but we talked a bit about running pace. I mentioned something about that at the end, but let me talk about it a little here so we have it on the record.
There's a lot more science the this game than might be obvious at first glance. The thing I mentioned today was the relationship between training pace and racing pace. The rule of thumb on this is your training pace should be between one minute and one and a half minutes from your goal racing pace. That means if you plan to run a 21:42 (7-minute pace) you should be training between 8:00-8:30 per mile on average. Yup, it's pretty much that cut and dried.
Of course we aren't starting there. The thing that makes this all so complex is timing training to peak at just the right time. We want to peak in October, so right now we are in building phase. I haven't said much about pace because I want you all to be able to cover distance safely. Here's the thing though... we can't just run forever. At some point we have to start introducing quality.
One of the things you can do every day is pay attention to your form. If your feet aren't landing under you (as we discussed before), you may need to make adjustments. You also need to try to open your stride a bit but relax while doing so. Often we play it safe and cut our stride lengths down, but in the end spend more energy slowing down than we would if we used a more optimum stride.
Anyway, we're going to work on this. Don't worry, things are going great. I'm very pleased with how it has gone. Still, we will ever move forward and upward. There will always be challenges!
My posts have gotten a bit erratic lately - sorry for that. A lot is happening behind the scenes you aren't seeing, and it seems I haven't yet developed the habit of sitting right down after practice and getting it done. I will try to do better.
Today, because of my ignorance, I missed most of practice. Coach Jo told me it went well, but we talked a bit about running pace. I mentioned something about that at the end, but let me talk about it a little here so we have it on the record.
There's a lot more science the this game than might be obvious at first glance. The thing I mentioned today was the relationship between training pace and racing pace. The rule of thumb on this is your training pace should be between one minute and one and a half minutes from your goal racing pace. That means if you plan to run a 21:42 (7-minute pace) you should be training between 8:00-8:30 per mile on average. Yup, it's pretty much that cut and dried.
Of course we aren't starting there. The thing that makes this all so complex is timing training to peak at just the right time. We want to peak in October, so right now we are in building phase. I haven't said much about pace because I want you all to be able to cover distance safely. Here's the thing though... we can't just run forever. At some point we have to start introducing quality.
One of the things you can do every day is pay attention to your form. If your feet aren't landing under you (as we discussed before), you may need to make adjustments. You also need to try to open your stride a bit but relax while doing so. Often we play it safe and cut our stride lengths down, but in the end spend more energy slowing down than we would if we used a more optimum stride.
Anyway, we're going to work on this. Don't worry, things are going great. I'm very pleased with how it has gone. Still, we will ever move forward and upward. There will always be challenges!
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