Progress Report

Seeing as though we’re almost exactly half-way through the calendar year I thought I’d take a look back to see how I’m doing on my Running Goals for 2012.

Training Goals:

Stay injury free for the duration of 2012.
Grade: C+ Only one semi-injury and the 3-week duration was fairly manageable. Still, I’d really like my hamstring problems to be behind me once and for all.

Get my weight below 180 (184 currently) and keep it there for the year.
Grade: B-  Got to 180, stayed there for 2 weeks, now back up to 184.
It would be a lot easier if the cookies, chips and ice cream didn’t call me by name!

Add more (and varied) cross training exercises to my training routine.
Grade: B+  Been swimming, biking, trail running and have even spent some time at the gym. Shocker!

Learn to swim. Not just treading water, but proper swimming technique.
Grade: A-  Took a class. Began slowly but have really improved as I’ve started to figure some things out. I really enjoy it and I'm looking forward to my first open-water swim later this summer.

Summary: For the most part I've been pretty happy with my training so far this year. I'm averaging more miles per week than I ever have in my 15 years of training. And with the biking and swimming it's been a very good mix of workouts. Certainly not bored.

Stepping Back

Rock Bottom. Ground Zero. Nadir. All-Time Low. These are not words that one would wish to use to describe the results of a recent important race or, in this case, a series of recent important races. But, that’s exactly the sort of lingual ballpark I find myself in after my current string of personal worst performances capped off by this weekend’s USATF-NE 10k Championships in Newton, Mass.

Tourist Season

"I am a Passenger"

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After last year’s “Lost Season”, 2012 was to be my big comeback. I planned it out. I did all the phyiso work. I ramped up my mileage carefully over the winter. I cross-trained like a mad man. I built a pretty strong base. I threw in some hill & tempo work. And I even added some track intervals recently to sharpen my speed. But, despite all my hard/smart work, my spring racing season has been nothing short of a bust.

I’ve signed up for, and run, a bunch of big races with top-notch runners to help push me to achieve the success that I was hoping for. But instead of stringing together a handful of PR’s it’s been one PW after another. For some reason, I just can’t seem to get on track and these races (and racers) have passed me by like I’m standing still. Just sitting by the side of the road watching the world go by and helpless to do anything about it. Honestly, it’s been more of a tourist season than a racing season.

Double Trouble

I ran two races in consecutive weekends (one almost exactly twice as long as the other) but both with nearly the same result - The Bedford Rotary 12k & The Pineland Farms 25k.  Two races, so different in character yet so similar in feel that it was almost like they were the same event.  This blurred together race - let’s call it “Bedland” (or better yet “Pineford”) - was the start of what I hoped would be a late spring/early summer string of success, building upon the quality training that I’ve been doing recently.  Unfortunately (I seem to use that word a lot these days) this was not the case.