POST-MCM PLANS:

A week after the MCM, I'm still bummed but not very banged up. I took a few days off, then ran 4-5 miles very easy for a couple days and took another day (Saturday) off. I feel ready to ease back into the swing of things this coming week. My mind is recovering less quickly than my body, though. As I said at the end of my last post, I don't know whether I can wait until next Fall for another shot at the marathon. So I registered for the Rock 'n Roll USA Marathon in DC on March 16, 2013, which is the current instantiation of what used to be the National Marathon (which I ran in 2011). My original plan had been to focus on speed at shorter distances this coming Spring, as I did last Spring, and then to shift toward longer distances in the Summer on the way to another Fall marathon. But it's not just a desire to run another marathon sooner that has me second-guessing that plan. It's also a desire to train in a more balanced way. Part of what I called marathon malaise a while back is a dissatisfaction with doing primarily one main kind of training all the time. So why shift from one imbalanced training regime to another one that is imbalanced in the opposite direction? I'm putting this too strongly - there are actually good reasons for so-called periodization in training. In my case, last Spring I made significant gains by focusing primarily on speed for the first time. And my underuse of tempo runs prior to late this summer gave me good reason to base my Fall marathon training around them, and that too was a significant step forward for me. But now it's time to integrate all of these elements into a balanced routine. Since I haven't done speedwork for months now, I'll need to focus disproportionately on that for a while in order to get back into it (carefully). That (along with shorter tempos) will be my focus for the next couple months, and I've registered for some shorter races in December as near-term goals. But once I get some speed back online, my plan now is to reduce the speedwork in January to one element in a more balanced routine that gives equal weight to endurance training - i.e., long runs, marathon-pace runs, longer tempos, and higher overall volume. Those endurance elements, starting in January, will build over 12 weeks or so toward the RnR USA Marathon, while the speed-oriented elements (shorter repetitions or hill repeats, longer VO2 max intervals, and ordinary tempo runs or tempo intervals) follow their own trajectory. This will be my first serious attempt at non-periodized training - I've never tried to do all those things at once. It will probably take a fair amount of trial and error before I hit on a way of integrating all those elements that works for me, if I ever do. But I'd like my priority to be trying to make that work, rather than just preparing for some specific race, whether it's the marathon in March or some other race. I plan on racing a lot over the Winter and Spring anyway, because I love and miss it. So there's no reason to overemphasize any particular race.