Rest Day

Today's my rest day. 16 hours at work. I do feel sort of beat today in the body weary overtrained way.

Last night I was reading some of The Lore of Running, which is an awesome book, a comprehensive training guide to running. The author emphasizes how beginning runners should not overtrain, how they should always go for distance before speed.

I think it is natural of my competitive nature to want to go out everytime and set a personal best either in distance or speed, but that is probably not the best way.

Between now and my debut race, I should work on the distance part, and then when I race I can kick it hard if I want to, zipping past the toddlers and old men down the homestretch and crossing the line before the organizers have packed up the hot dog stand and beer tent for the day.

I don't have the book with me at work, but it has an excellent section on heart rates -- to the effect that the 80-90% was an okay zone to be in some of the time -- that it would produce gains. I think I need to alternate between the 70-80 and 80-90 zones.

I'm working 12 hours tommorrow starting at 7:30 in the morning so if I run, it will have to be early. The problem with that is tread mills are limited to 20 minutes then. I want to start some road running, but with all the snow, there is not much space on the road to run in. It is going to warm up by the end of the week and hopefully take the snow with it when it gets into the 60's. Maybe I can do long slow runs on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with one run being two miles on the outside road to get accustomed to the asphalt.

I also don't want to neglect my strength training. For all the cardio I have been doing, my body feely flabby because I am not lifting like I used to. I think strength training is way better for how your body looks. I need to do both obviously.