Nasty, is the best way to describe the weather today, freezing rain, rain, sleet, snow and then any combination during the day. I have to let the crap freeze up over night before I am going to attempt to snow blow the driveways…otherwise the snow blower tire tread and footprints will be so deep in the ice when it does freeze that it is miserable to walk on them.

But this is what the road looked like right after the plow went by. It wasn’t that nice later or earlier.

Which meant that I got to drive SD2 into Augusta and headed to my workout early. This was supposed to be an easy day, so I did a little extra on the pre-workout and 0.5 mile warm-up on the treadmill.

Doing the pre and post run extra work is a little more time consuming, but I do notice a difference when I do them. So I am attempting to do them whenever I can.

I did try the Liberty ISOs again, just to see how they felt, I made it to a quarter-mile and decided to stop and put on my Tempo 9s. The Liberty ISOs are a great running shoe, but they just are not what I want. They are too firm and pull too much on my Achilles to run distances comfortably in them. Which is too bad, because they are one of those running shoes that you really want to work for you and you give them more chances than you normally do to get them to work.

In the end, for me they just didn’t feel nearly as good as my adidas Tempo 9s.

So they will go away.

The run itself was not anything other than an easy, but good 4.0 mile run on the treadmill. I started out at 6.1 mph for a mile and bumped it up to 6.2 mph for last 3.0.

Running at this speed is hard for, because it does take longer to get my runs done, although I have gotten past the ego thing about running slower. I know that I have to run recovery runs at slower speeds than I have in the past, if I want to improve and stay more injury-free.

Attempting to train by heart-rate did teach me how to run slower and what the slower pace needed to be. I find that running by heart-rate on the treadmill keeps me honest about what slow should be.

I also found that it is also very close to the recommended paces in the Hansons Marathon Method. So that gave that training method more validity to me than it did the first time read/tried it.

It seems as though 2019 is going to be my year to actually learn/realize that I have to change how I approach my training and at what paces are appropriate to the conditioning that I am actually in versus the way my mind seems to think I should be running.

Old and stubborn, I am, but even old and stubborn arses can learn…well eventually. 🙂

It still doesn’t mean that I will do things correctly all the time, but I have a feeling that I might be able to do my body better going forward.