I said that I CAN achieve this regularly.  Or COULD, if I just have the mental discipline.

Oops.  My bad.  No need to yell.  I get it now.

 

Yeah, you've got to be strong to handle that and be running big mileage, but those would be money workouts.

 

This reminds me of a point that is hard to remember--we should be looking to make progress in our workouts as we go through a training cycle: running a bit longer, a bit faster.

 

I came to that realization a bit last winter. It's fricking cold here and hard to run hard. It is a default base phase.

I realized, though, that in base phase that there needs to be some foreshadowing of training to come. It takes too long to build in a hard running phase if the previous work hasn't been adequate to adapt to hard running, therefore peak performance comes after the race. As the wonderful Zatopek said "I already know how to run slow".

 Really enjoy reading this thread. Lots of good information here. Thanks.

Regarding favorite workouts, I always loved progression runs.  The best year I had, I did that at last once a week.  Usually, they were spontaneous.  I'd start out comfortable, and decide to run the next mile or two harder, and kept going.  This workout just always made me feel....good.

I don't have much to add but just wanted to mention that I really like progression runs too, and mostly random as well.

Look at my avatar.  Of course I'm yelling.

Is that bad Gandalf or something?

 

I was doing a lot of HM paced tempos in November and December of last year, just as I was getting into training and running a lot of 80-100 mile weeks. Check my log, and click on the "Moderate" days.

 

I did not find these efforts to be extremely taxing, certainly nothing like the effort required to race a half marathon. That's why I labeled them "Moderate."

I noticed that the number of days between the "Moderate" workouts varied. My take-away is that you did them whenever you kind of felt that the time was right (i.e., that you were due for one or felt fresh enough for one). 

"What we are doing"--this could be favorite workouts, general training structures, thoughts on balancing quality and volume, things that we keep trying to accomplish but fail, etc. Instead of aiming for banal generalities (as my initial post sort of does), we might try to keep things specific.

 

The idea is to produce a thread that folks can look to when they want to try something different. A thread that has some concrete strategies, some actual workouts, and maybe even how we would train if we could get our shit together in real life.

Cool.  There's 5 more pages to this thread since the last time I looked at it and I see scovill has popped in which means I need to go back and read the whole thing at some point.  But not now, too busy.

At any rate what I'm doing now is treading water through the holidays.  Then it will be winter and it will really hard to do any kind of real workouts for a while.  So I'll run as much as I can, go faster a couple times a week if possible, do some hills if possible and race once in a while.  All while trying to earn a living.

I think I have my shit relatively together in real life, which is what makes it so hard to train seriously.  But that's also what I like about it, the challenge of keeping all the plates spinning and not letting any of them crash on the floor.  When I've been able to make it work, it's been really really good.  I have racing goals.  I train to race.  I like running and I love racing.  The rest is details.

Funny, Julia Lucas (her 5k is faster than mine) is talking about some of the same stuff that's been mentioned on this thread. Stuff like why we do this in the first place, which is of course an essential part of the "training" question--the part about knowing yourself.

Well, isn't that a big part of the training equation?  Really, that's why it's so hard to tell people "You need to do these workouts".  We all know that just isn't how it works.  Look at the discussion in this thread; some workouts people use just aren't the same for others.

I keep running because I want to know more about myself, and because I want to be better.  Not just a better runner, a better me.  Yeah, maybe that sounds sappy and stupid, but it's where I am at these days.

 

That would NOT be an easy workout for me.  I'm not saying I couldn't do it...or shouldn't do it every now and then.  But that would be a tough workout for me.  I haven't really done many workouts in 2009...that is something I plan on changing next year.  One of my training rules has always been that doing any repeat or interval work for over 5 min, you start dropping way off on the gains for your time spent.  So I would personally leave out the mile repeats if you aren't in the group of people that should be doing them under 5 min pace.  For myself, I'll try to stick to things that are about 1200m or less.  I think I get the same physiological benifit from doing 5 x 1200 @ HM pace, and less risk for injury than if I did 5 x mile at HM pace. 

Really? You run 13.1 @ 6:??, no injury, and you say it's too hard to run 1 mile at that pace, take a break, and repeat 4 more times for a total of '5' miles of quality. That's well within your/our ability to do. You're overthinking, maybe underthinking this workout my friend.