Feeling The Need For Speedwork

Another Hi-Lo day.

Ran the 2 hour loop and tried to put some of my speed work into practice. My thinking was since I’ve been doing all of these hill sprints and some track work, I should be able to cut some time off of the 2 hour loop so I can lengthen it out again.

Boy did I get a shock.


I started the loop feeling good. But it didn’t take long before everything slowed down to a crawl. My legs just won’t turn over and it’s probably due to a combination of activities, like the electrolyte imbalance mentioned in a previous post and the high temperatures. Mostly, however, I think it’s due to the fact that for the past few months, I’ve been doing nothing but LSD (Long Slow Distance).

I can’t remember who said it, but I remember what they said: If you want to run fast, you simply have to run fast.

Well, in today’s run, I wasn’t running fast. My legs were feeling like big lead weights. Not only that, I could not get any lift out of them.

Since I knew I could get on the track and get 2 to 3 minutes of power out of my legs, I decided to run the last 4 miles as a fartlek. That seemed to wake things up a bit.

Over the last few months since before running the Cleveland Marathon, I’ve worked on building my base and extending my distance. In the process, I’ve probably shortened up every muscle in my legs along with my gait and atrophied any fast twitch fibers I had left in my hips.

If I plan to pull a decent time out of the marathons coming up in the fall, my training strategy will have to change. Shorter distances with a focus on the track.

I predict much pain for the month of August.

2 hour loop today (actually, yesterday again).