Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The future.

I found out today that my body never fully got over the mono I had in December. I was pretty close, but once I started upping my mileage and then attempted to race the 2 big races (which went extremely poorly, I should add), my body started to shut down again, so my health is fairly poor right now. My sports medicine doctor and I have devised a plan for recovery. I'm taking the next 3 to 4 weeks off and then I get to start up again with a whopping 5 miles a day. However, I get to up my mileage 10% per week, which will give me really big mileage by November/December after a long steady build. I'm debating one potential race in November, but I won't know if I'm going to run it until several months from now. I really have almost nothing else that I'm considering running until Rocky Raccoon 100 in February. I am determined to be VERY fit, have the kind of 100 mile race that my marathon and 50 mile performances indicate I am capable of, and I have come to realize that the only way to run well for 100 miles is to run more than everyone else training for the race. I've experimented with fairly high mileage prevoiusly, getting as high as 135-140 miles in a week, but I've always run it at way too hard of an effort to run that much consistently. Before my health plummeted, however, I noticed that if I would simply stop running so HARD everyday, I could do a heck of a lot more mileage and consistently pound out 20+ miles in the mountains over and over. So, the bottom line is that once I start running again in a few weeks, I'm going to start into the biggest overwork of my aerobic base that I've ever done. I suppose my blog won't be particularly interesting in the next month or 2, but one of my goals with that big mileage is going to be to do something of 30-50 miles as a trainer almost every single weekend, starting in around 2-3 months, so that ought to be an entertaining read I would hope.