Go slow to go fast.

I decided not to do the 45 minutes of threshold running that was on the schedule for today.

I felt minor stiffness in my left foot when I woke up that went away after a minute or less.  Not a huge deal.  But I prefer to hit hard workouts when I feel perfect or pretty darn close to it, and excited to go attack the workout.  I don’t like going into workouts questioning at all whether I should be doing them.

My body and mind told me that an easy run would be the best thing for me today, so I complied.  Even though that means my running will be easy all week and I probably won’t get any solid workouts in, just a bunch of easy runs.  Tomorrow I’m driving to Utah to pace at Wasatch, Friday I’ll be crewing at Wasatch, and Saturday I’ll be hiking/running all night at Wasatch with Steve. (Which i’m stoked about)

I’ll still get in about 70 miles this week.  But here are my thoughts:

Training plans are great.  As long as I know they are meant to be broken as dictated by my body’s response to them.  I hear too often and have seen too many people follow training plans exactly only to end up injured.  So I am pretty determined to not do that.  I would much rather arrive to a race or event somewhat under trained, than not arrive at all.  Or arrive with big question marks in my mind on whether I will damage myself by doing the race.  Or be dealing with the super annoying task of minor injury recovery along the way.  Much better to take the conservative path and run easy and do proper therapy/recovery until I feel really good, then continue hitting the solid workouts.  I believe I will perform better over the long term.  So I’m sticking to my motto:  Go slow to go fast.

As a result today, after 9 miles/1:23 of flat easy and slow running my body and mind feel invigorated and I don’t feel any stiffness or tightness anywhere.  I’m guessing by the time I get time for a workout next Monday/Tuesday I’ll probably be fired up and ready for a solid performance enhancing effort.  And my body should have had plenty of time to make use of the work I did in my last few weeks of solid workouts by then.