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Hey There...

It's been a while...again. My bad. Only one post in August? Shame on me.

Although, in my defense, not really much had been happening with my training; I spent most of August on the disabled list. I wanted to be careful with some Achilles' tendinitis, so I took about 3 weeks off before getting back into it a couple weeks ago.

In that three weeks, I lost a fair amount of my fitness from the summer, so any shot at a fall marathon was and is now out of the question. But that's okay, I'm in need of a new mental and physical approach to my training.

So consider this the start of that new approach. (And this time I need to stick to blogging.)

The goal of this new approach is a spring marathon. Maybe the Flying Pig again (I did win free registration at a race a few weeks ago, so that's hard to turn down), maybe some other race. Hell, it's a long way off, but maybe it'll even be a fall marathon. The point is, I'm doing a long build up for the goal race - a solid 8, 9 months.

The method for reaching this goal is a more Lydiard-esque approach. Arthur Lydiard, the legendary coach of the great New Zealand middle distance runners, stressed long periods of aerobic conditioning (high mileage) following by heavy intervals (race-specific training) only in the last 6 weeks of training. That's what the long build up is for.

In the meantime, I'm going to be treating races more as fitness-checks, as little gauges of shape as I progress towards the longer-term goal. This takes some of the pressure off of those races - pressure that mostly comes from myself.

So check out the links on the right for my fall racing schedule, and come out to the races if you can!

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