Why Run Less, Run Faster

I’ll be running my first marathon, Wineglass, this October.

I decided a couple of years ago that 2015 would be a good year to do a marathon because I would have had three years of solid running experience and at the time I thought I would have more time. Back then, I didn’t know that I was going to get married, move, and do house renovation. Once I realized that I had too much going on in the spring and elected to postpone it til fall, I chose Wineglass because I did the half a couple of years ago and loved it. It’s a gentle net downhill point to point course during one of the nicest times of the year. In terms of time, I know that there’s never a good time for any big decision. Just times that are less bad. If I didn’t do it this year, I would still have other things going on next year that could potentially interfere. So, I’m just going to go ahead and bite the bullet.

In the past, I’ve always created my own on-the-fly training program for the various races that I did. I was improving. I got faster. New PRs were created. I saw no reason to do anything different as long as I was happy with the progress that I was making. Last winter/spring, I tried to complete a training program for the first time. I picked MyAsics for a spring half marathon because I like their philosophy (tempo run based) and I saw it as a way of getting me to increase my mileage without running every day and without running too much (it peaked at 30 miles/week). Unfortunately I had to abandon the plan and training due to the lack of time. While I really wish I could have finished out the training plan so that I could have seen how well I would have done, I had a sneaking suspicion that the lack of speed work was affecting me (specifically that despite the increase in mileage, I was getting slower).

When I made my own training plans, speed work was my foundation, which is a very different training philosophy from the standard view. Most of my training runs were various different kinds of speed work, a few tempo runs, and a couple long runs for the half marathons. I know that I need to do more long runs for a marathon and I figure a training program created by people who actually know marathons would probably be better than what I’d do left to my own devices. After much thought, I decided the Run Less, Run Faster, best suited my own preferences for training.

I strongly wish to only run 3 times a week. I know RLRF thinks I should cycle, row, or swim for cross-training, but I won’t. I’ll be doing more weightlifting and yoga as cross-training. I’m eager to get back into speed work. I’ve missed it. I tried to do mile intervals yesterday on the treadmill. Oof! I need to get my speed back!