Kidding Myself and the Basics of Base Training

My continued attempts and failures at making a comeback in running have become a bit of a joke. Part of the reason it keeps happening is that it's easy to fool myself for a while; anyone who's ever had a good day training and thought "Hey, I'm in better shape than I thought" can relate.

I could run a mile every day in 8 minutes. With a few weeks of training - and the type of training is almost irrelevant - I can run a mile in 7 1/2 minutes every day. If I could run one in 7 minutes each day, I'd be back in shape, 6 1/2 and I'd be winning age groups, 6 and I'd be setting records. The thing is: I can run better than average for five days in a row (and have, many times, but never 6!), so I get to where I'm running 7 to 7 1/2 and that's just a 5 day streak, but it feels real at the time. I think I'm making a comeback and then everything goes wrong. I can fool myself longer if I take intentional days off. If I run hill workouts, because the pace is automatically slowed, I make allowances and I can fool myself some more. A bad day or even a bad week - which is actually back to average - I can attribute to weather or a poor night's sleep or something else. Then I've fooled myself for a long time and disaster strikes, I get hurt and several weeks later, I start over again.

I can't fool myself, though, with just running even pace every day, day after day, for weeks or months. That's what my plan is now and it's not going to be very interesting to report. To get where I want to be, I'll need to run 45-50 minutes on my recovery days, but that was about the limit of what I could run a few weeks ago. I set the goal of running for 45 minutes and then to the next 0.5 mile mark, which would put me in that range. After a number of weeks (only 3, as it turned out, as I really do get bored that easily), I started adding two longer runs each week, because my goal is to have two hard workouts per week.

Increasing mileage 10% every three weeks, with one easy week each cycle, then gives the following times run (in minutes) each day:

45  45  45  45  45  45  45
45  45  45  45  45  45  45
45  45  45  45  45  45  60
45  45  60  45  45  45  60
45  45  60  45  45  45  60
45  45  45  45  45  45  75
45  45  75  45  45  45  75
45  45  75  45  45  45  75
45  45  45  45  45  45  90
45  45  90  45  45  45  90
45  45  90  45  45  45  90
45  45  45  45  45  45 110
45  45 110  45  45  45 110
45  45 110  45  45  45 110
45  45  45  45  45  45 130
45  45 130  45  45  45 130
45  45 130  45  45  45 130
45  45  45  45  45  45  150
45  45 150  45  45  45 150
45  45 150  45  45  45 150

So now you know what my training looks like for the next 5 months. Not exactly exciting, but it might get me somewhere.