A bit of history.

My current training logs are all electronic, either an excel spreadsheet, a google doc to track volume, or the uploaded stats from my GPS watch onto Garmin's website. I had this idea of taking all my older training logs from high school and early university and putting them into excel spreadsheets, like those that I now use. I've been drifting back through the history of my running career.

Throughout this season I'm going to do several blogs that take a look back. Here's the first one.  

In front of me is my log from the 2002 track season when I was in grade 10. I came into the season with the following PB's:

400m - maybe non-existent

800m - 1:59

1500m - 4:07?

3km - 9:13

I finished the season with following PB's

400m - 49.7

800m - 1:54

1500m - 4:03

3km - 8:49

I'm trying to find a "typical" training week, but every week seems to be a mash-up of workouts, easy runs, and races. There's almost an anti-structure; a purposeful absence of rigidness to better suit the young ADHD sixteen year old mind. Every week that appears to possess a hint of order ends in "drove down to ____" followed by the race. I guess that is as good as typical:

Sunday: 45min run (the "long" run of the week, sometimes up to 50minutes)

Monday: day-off (...usually)

Tuesday: 200 (400m pace) - 5min rest - 4x200 (800m pace with 30sec rest b/) - 5min rest - 200 (400m pace); splits were 26.5, 28.4-29.1-29.4-28.5, 25.6

Wednesday: 30min run

Thursday: warm-up 

Friday: drove down to Kelowna for Jack Brow meet; raced 3km in 8:49 for 3rd place

Saturday: 4x100m relay (serious.)

Sunday: 1500m race in 4:04 for 3rd, barely out-kicked by Iain McCormack with cornrows

Getting stronger.

I've finished the first cycle of training down here. The cruel thing about training is that during the hard weeks you feel exhausted and beat up; then in the recovery week all the fatigue catches up and you feel even worse; and then you start back into the hard training again just as you finally begin to feel good.

First track workout.

Sorry but there's no fancy video this week, but maybe next week...

I did my first track workout of the season on Friday, a couple sets of 4x400m, a 1500m classic. It's hard to imagine that this workout is the first of many that will eventually lead to Olympic standards; only the very last 400m (57.x sec)was at the pace needed to run a time of 3:35, and the others weren't even close (60+ sec).

I know better than to expect much out of the first track session, and really the session wasn't especially tough. The real doozies are still ahead, and that's when splits will matter. Most importantly right now is that I'm healthy and without injury, and I'm ahead of where I was last year in training. 

I booked my flights up to Seattle for an indoor 5km on February 10th. I can't wait to get up there for another 5km; my race there last year was a little ambitious, and blew up in my face in a big way...

I'm not going to do anything stupid this time (like try to lead the last four kilometres).

Back to Poopsdale.

I'm in Scottsdale again.