Three Things: Endurance Work

The second area of improvement I'm focusing on this summer, and has been one of my biggest areas of focus for 2018 is endurance work. To run a marathon, it's incredibly important to have a strong endurance base to carry you through hours of running and racing. At the start of 2018 I told Toni that my goal was to not miss a long run this year. If there is a run on my schedule that I'm apt to miss, it's the long run. Easy runs, fun! Speed work, you bet! Group runs, duh! Long run, meh..... that sounds hard. But a podcast I listened to in late 2017/early 2018 said that the best thing you can do to improve your running performance is to have a consistent long run practice. Game on.

Up until March when I had my knee issue, I stuck with that goal, and luckily for me I had the caveat of not skipping a long run "because I didn't want to." I will say with 100% certainty that I didn't want to skip the long runs when my knee was bothering me, but I had to. I did skip one long run while I was in Boston but I blame that on an unplanned night on the town and Jeri not being able to go out and have a good time like she used to be able to in her early 20s. Oops!

During our training cycle we'll have several long-long runs 14-20 miles. Uff da, that's a long way. We also have a lot of longer runs during the week ranging from 6-11 miles. Extra uff da. Anything to make that endurance base stronger to help me reach my marathon goal. PR or bust guys. Shoot, I should stop saying that. I think every time I've been PR or bust, I literally bust something during the race. I TAKE IT BACK. IGNORE EVERYTHING.

Moving on.

Luckily for me, I had a major shift somewhere over the last year and long runs really became fun. It's in large part to my BRF Toni, and the fact that a couple of hours running with her flies by in the blink of an eye. But it's also largely in part to the level of shape I'm in right now. It's been a long time since I've felt this strong and fit physically, and it's no longer an anxiety inducing event to go out and run 10-12 miles on the weekends. I will likely be singing a different tune when we're running 18-20 in the blazing heat in July/August, but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, just ask Kelly Clarkson.