Welcome to another Thursday discussion! This week’s discussion comes from the newsletter last week about bettering yourself with no races or gyms. What have you done differently with your training during the pandemic? If this is your season of rest and recovery, that’s cool too!
In the past year, I've doubled down on stoicism — it emphasizes being mindful, acknowledging that not all things are in our control, but that we have some agency in how we respond. It's a useful mantra for runners, either when we're competing in the race we trained for, or (in my current case) building back up fitness & passion.
Morning! I was doing great in November and December, but my running has been on hold since early January, when I and the whole family came down with Covid. (We're all okay, thankfully we had very mild cases.) I'm actually a little nervous about getting back to running -- though I really want to -- b/c of all those cases we all heard about college football players developing myocarditis when they went back to working out with their teams. My desire is still there to get back out and run, though!
I've been able to rebuild my fitness. Before the pandemic I didn't have enough time to train more than a couple days per week (yes, really :/ ). I walked at least 5k every day during my commuting, though. Now I'm doing some form of intentional exercise 4-5 days per week, including strength training. I want to increase the distance and number of days per week that I run.
Have not done much new, but this spring/summer will concentrate more on speed then I have past couple years. Since I started training/racing ultra's have gotten away from speed work and look forward to some half marathon paced runs. Would like to try and run some half marathons in next couple years and see if I can improve my times at my advance age (64).
I'm less obsessed with my workout paces and able to view the big picture more objectively. My daily schedule hasn't changed (I work in healthcare), but with lack of races I haven't been worried about whether or not I hit "key" workouts or certain performance indicators, which is something I was too worried about when I was aiming for a specific marathon time.
Two changes...first I stopped long runs during the summer. With no marathons really to train for I thought why beat myself up during the Texas summer. Second has been many many more solo runs. I still with a few of my peeps, but the groups are smaller and much less frequent.
In the past year, I've doubled down on stoicism — it emphasizes being mindful, acknowledging that not all things are in our control, but that we have some agency in how we respond. It's a useful mantra for runners, either when we're competing in the race we trained for, or (in my current case) building back up fitness & passion.
Morning! I was doing great in November and December, but my running has been on hold since early January, when I and the whole family came down with Covid. (We're all okay, thankfully we had very mild cases.) I'm actually a little nervous about getting back to running -- though I really want to -- b/c of all those cases we all heard about college football players developing myocarditis when they went back to working out with their teams. My desire is still there to get back out and run, though!
I've been able to rebuild my fitness. Before the pandemic I didn't have enough time to train more than a couple days per week (yes, really :/ ). I walked at least 5k every day during my commuting, though. Now I'm doing some form of intentional exercise 4-5 days per week, including strength training. I want to increase the distance and number of days per week that I run.
Have not done much new, but this spring/summer will concentrate more on speed then I have past couple years. Since I started training/racing ultra's have gotten away from speed work and look forward to some half marathon paced runs. Would like to try and run some half marathons in next couple years and see if I can improve my times at my advance age (64).
I'm less obsessed with my workout paces and able to view the big picture more objectively. My daily schedule hasn't changed (I work in healthcare), but with lack of races I haven't been worried about whether or not I hit "key" workouts or certain performance indicators, which is something I was too worried about when I was aiming for a specific marathon time.
Two changes...first I stopped long runs during the summer. With no marathons really to train for I thought why beat myself up during the Texas summer. Second has been many many more solo runs. I still with a few of my peeps, but the groups are smaller and much less frequent.