After running since October without any real break, things caught up with me and I have done the Hansons Training Methods since the second week of January. Needless to say the body and mind, were both pretty crispy.

Let’s go outside and play!

While I was only about 5 weeks away from finishing the Half Marathon plan, I don’t have a race that I am really planning to run, so I decided that a cut-back week was going to be more beneficial in the overall scheme of my running.

So guess what that is what I did.

My cut-back week went like this:

Three glorious days off, some easier/shorter runs than usual and then a nice 8.0 miler on Sunday, where I ran a nice progression run. I still made my goal of 20 miles for the week and didn’t feel like I was nearly as beat up as I did at the start of the week.

It was almost like the longer and faster stuff was really beating my body up. I know that I need run race pace for longer distances, but at the same time, for me at least, this was taking a lot out of me once I got into the strength portion of the training plan. So maybe I need to re-think the distances that I should be training for and I have been.

More on that later in the month after I make some choices.

Also the big reason that I hadn’t planned any races for the end of this plan was that we were planning on going out west for 2-3 weeks and hadn’t quite nailed down the dates yet – other than April/May time frame. Well those plans were changed last week and we won’t be going until September if everything works out. So that also means that the races that I like to do in April may be back in play.

So there are a lot of things to think about this coming week. Part of this is being brought on by my reading the Passion Paradox and some of the ideas that are being presented in that book. Yeah, it is pretty good and it is forcing me to re-examine a few things.

All I know is that I feel a LOT better than I did to begin the week and have some things to think about when it comes to my running this spring. While I believe in how good the Hansons Method is to prepare me for a half marathon, I am not all that gung-ho on running one. However, the plan has been a great way to create a training base and shown me that I can do the plan, with a couple of modifications.

Primarily one or two cut-back weeks included, just a part of being an older and historically fragile runner.

I am more of a 5-10K kind of guy and I really am not all that into the racing scene. So we will see what I do next.

Either way, I am excited about my running again. 🙂