Introduction

I'm looking forward to writing about running on this site. Hopefully I will post fairly regularly, but I make no promises.

I'm currently running in Rochester, NY. I've got my eyes set on the 10K at Penn Relays on April 24th. My goal is to break my PR of 30:05 and go under 30. I set my PR four years ago when I was a sophomore at Williams College.

Training style: I'm a low-mileage trainer. I don't like to go above 65 miles per week and I think that I get diminishing returns out of doing so. Instead I'd rather be supplementing my running with alternative forms of exercise including (in order of importance): aqua running, jump rope, core strength, weight lifting, biking, and swimming.

Recently I haven't been doing much of those except for a little jump rope and core. Acquiring an inexpensive pool membership and fitting it into my schedule is a current goal.

In terms of how I fill the running miles of my week I do one long run (90+ minutes) per week and ideally two speed workouts. Again, recently the ideal has not gelled with reality. I've been doing at least one "focused" workout per week either with Fleet Feet or Ryan Mulcahy, a Geneseo runner. I can best explain what I mean by "focus" by describing the vast majority of my runs. Most of the time I go out, take it easy for 15-20 minutes and plan the rest of my run during that time. Sometimes I don't even plan. I just let my legs do their thing. Often the results are the same. I do a 40-ish minute fartlek workout and a short cooldown to round out an hour.

I'm not trying to devalue these fartleks. They are my bread and butter and I work hard when I'm running them. I just know that I need to be diversifying my training right now.

Fartlek, as many of us know, means "speed play", but that ends up looking very different for different people when put into practice. My fartleks come in two varieties. In one, I run at a moderately fast pace and vary the pace a small amount around my lactate threshold pace. In the other, I alternate between slow (7 min pace) running and faster (3k speed, I suppose) intervals. My fartleks are free-form, loosely planned, untimed, and I don't count my fast intervals. Basically it is a "fast, but whatever I want"-type run. This is how I contrast fartleks from proper workouts. Proper workouts, for me, are intervals, well-defined by either time or distance or both. A particular number of intervals is decided upon beforehand and that becomes the goal.

So that's a little about me and my training philosophy.
There's more to come.
Thank you for reading.