Thursday, August 27, 2009

From overtraining to undertraining?

I did it. I don't know how, or when, but I became a morning person.

The secret is getting to bed early. When training, I should be getting 8-9 hours of sleep a night, so that I recover from my workouts and don't overtrain. I usually get up between 5 and 5:30, meaning I try to get to bed before 9pm.

Seriously, I'm getting old and boring. However, I do give myself a weekday and Friday off to go out and have fun, except my routine is making me tired by 10pm and I still tend to wake up before 6am. At the same time, I love it. I get up and have a pre-run snack and then I have time to get things done (dishes, laundry... God I sound like my mom). After my run, I have a small post-run snack and I usually do a bit of a workout and then I get ready, make a decent breakfast and coffee, watch the morning news, check my email, and walk a mile to work (that actually adds up to another 10 miles a week). That extra 4 hours in the morning seems to make work less painful and I'm much more awake. The weather is nearly perfect that early, and there is hardly any traffic so I can run on the streets. This morning, I did an 8-mile run and a stair workout. The stair workout was extra tough, and I kept a really good pace throughout the run.

My problem is, I think I might still be overtraining. I wake up a lot throughout the night, which never used to happen, and that is one symptom. However, my workouts are pretty strong, I have a good energy level, I get enough sleep, and I always have a recovery meal. Since I'm not sore, I won't jump to the conclusion that I'm overdoing it. The reason I worry is I had a bit of a slump in July, and I don't think I properly increased my mileage, I sort of jumped right back into training. I'm going to keep my mileage the same next week, and see if it helps my body catch up to where I should be. I'm only at 38 miles a week, and I worry that I should be doing more than that. This and next week consists of:

Sun- 16 miles
Mon- 6 miles easy tempo
Tues- 4 miles speed workout
Wed- recovery
Thurs- 8 miles and stair workout
Fri- 4 miles speed workout
Sat- recovery
Sun- 18 miles

Maybe next week I'll make that 8-miler a 10-miler? Thing is, I'm good in terms of endurance and distance, its my pace that worries me, which is why I have two speedworkouts a week. I try to run the .42 laps sub- 3 minutes and my 6 and 8 mile runs at race pace (8-8:30 minute mile pace) unless I make the 6-miler a tempo run. If thats my focus, I think the low mileage is acceptable. Once I'm at a 20 mile long run and a 10 mile mid-week run, my mileage will get high enough for peak training.

Yes I just went from dicussing how I was overtraining to not training hard enough. See how confusing it all is?

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