Hey, the first major success of 2019, I was able to complete a 12 x .25 repeats, with .25 recoveries – something that I have not been able to do in years!

Fist pump!!! Yeah.

With nasty weather outside, there was not way I was going to do speedwork on anything but the treadmill. Although Bennie and I did get a 2.0 mile walk in before I left for the gym.

Last night I was re-reading Hanson’s Marathon Method (no I am not going to do a marathon), because I remembered that it had a LOT of great ideas and sound advice that a lot of runners have used successfully.

Now I have done pretty well in the avoiding injury department lately (knock on wood), because I am running a little smahter than I have in the past. However, when I re-read the section on how they plan their speed work, a big arse light came on for me. Ummmm Harold maybe you are attempting to run too fast for your actual conditioning and your recoveries have been at what I would expect to be Marathon Race Pace.

That remembering how I used to train versus how I should be training.

So I plugged in my latest time trial 5K 21:29 and added a minute to it, because I know that I cheated on that one during the last mile. Which put me around 22:30, which I am pretty sure that I can do on most flatter 5K courses. Then when I used that time to compute my 400m pace, it gave a 1:50 or about 8.3 mph (7:13 pace) on the treadmill.

This speed is .4 to .8 mph slower than I typically do on a quarter mile repeat workout, but I figured that I would use the Hanson’s Method pacing chart to see how it worked out. Without any doubt the slower speed did make a difference in how good I felt throughout the workout. In the past when I ran with the faster paces that I thought that I could maintain, it invariably ended up with me only getting to 6 or even 8 repeats, before being toast and then have to shut down the workout before I was done.

Today, I was able to finish all 12 of the scheduled repeats and reap the benefits of the complete workout, not just a partial one. The mile warm-up and cool-down felt good as well. I do have to admit that having the time to focus on my running does make it easier to go slower. I don’t have that time constraint at this time and it makes it so I can relax and run.

Yeah, at some points, I was tempted to increase the speed a little on both the fast and recovery repeats, because I was feeling really good. However, I kept thinking back to the book and what the author said about doing the workout as designed to get the full benefit and not overdoing (not that I would ever overdo any workout) them to avoid issues down the road.

So even though I am not training for a marathon any time soon, I am going to use portions of the Hanson’s Marathon training plan, just to give me a framework to train over the next few months. Even if I “only” run a half marathon or some other distances, I have a feeling that this plan will provide me with a really nice base to get me ready for whatever kind of running I decide to do moving forward in 2019.

Although I probably will not follow it completely, I plan to follow a lot of it.

Yeah, it will be challenging, but as strange as it might sound I do want to be challenged and I have a feeling as long as I follow the pacing charts, the speeds are more in line with my capabilities now, not how I would like them to be or how I used to run.

Who knows maybe I will even surprise myself with how I do.

The easy runs are even in the pace zone that I was running with my heart-rate monitor, so that will be a tool I will be using to maintain the slower paces for easy runs.

That would be a nice change.