Since today is a holiday (BC day) I slept in a bit had a good breakfast and hit the trails at 10:00 am. I was just going to run a slow 8.2 Km or two laps around the university. I felt really heavy at first and my speed felt much slower than the effort I was putting into it. It was considerably cooler today than the past two weeks but I was still feeling a bit slow. I decided to crank up my effort from my average 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being race day effort), to about 8 or 80% of race day effort. So I really began to crank. I finished my first lap and hit my split button on my watch and kept going. I was pretty tired but was still giving a good effort. I checked my split time and realized I had finished lap one less than 22 minutes which is a first since starting my intense training schedule. I decided not to stop at lap one but to keep my effort up around 8. I saw quite a few people on the run so I began to use them as an excuse to really crank, you know, so I could try to look cooler than I really am. Finally on the last Km I saw a strong runner in front of me about 100 meters and I noticed I was catching him. So I just really pushed. I used some top secret visualization techniques (I can't divulge since I will be relying on the strategies to give me a leg up during my races this year) and began to close the gap. With 100 meters to go I had closed the gap to less than 10 meters and then the guy veered off the trail and I finished my lap and hit stop on my watch. I was super stoked I had improved my time from my previous lap by 4 seconds, a negative split, my first since this bout of training! I was pumped. I came home showered and filled out my log, browsed some running sites, and wrote this blog. I think I am going to take the fam to check out some new trails I will be running on soon for my long weekend runs. I love running what a great facet of my life.
I just finished reading a book by Ernst van Aaken Called "Van Aaken Method". I am a huge proponent of long slow distance and started working towards the "Lydiard Method" way of training earlier this Spring. Van Aaken was experimenting with long slow distance before Lydiard, as early as the 40's. Though both methods are quite similar there are some slight differences. I experimented with both over the last bit and have merged the methods into a plan that works well for me, with my plan resembling Lydiard's method the closest. These endurance centered methods are the extreme opposite of the tempo or interval training methods that experienced popularity in the middle of the last Century, the premise of which is to run many anaerobic intervals (using more oxygen than you can breath causing lactic acid to form) without full recovery between intervals. What is Long Slow Distance? In a nutshell the theory involves running every day and running as much mileage
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