By popular demand, I am starting a thread to chronicle my attempt to return to the pre-meltdown form I had in 2004, and then go beyond that. I call it my quixotic quest because I harbor no illusions about the importance of what I'm doing. This is just for fun. This is far from the most important thing in my life--if it were, I really would be crazy since it's well established that I don't have a lot of talent for this. But running is certainly my most important hobby. Background: 37 y.o. male, running on and off since age 14. Track in H.S. (400, 800). Didn't run in College. Started running road races at age 30. PR's: 400 - 53.7 (1987) 800 - 2:03 (1987) mile - 4:48 (1987) 5K - 17:00 (2004) 10K - 35:24 (2004) 13.1 - 1:17:56 (2004) 26.2 - 2:57:46 (2002) In late 2004 life threw some hurdles at me and I took a break. I did very little running and no racing for all of 2005 and the first half of 2006. Then I started training again, pretty much from scratch. On June 1, 2006, I was 175 lbs. and I couldn't run 1 mile in 6:30. After 5.5 months of 50 mpw base, I was 156 lbs. and ran 18:14 for 5K in October and 1:25:31 for HM in November. More recently, after another 4+ months of 50-60 mpw, I ran 1:23:33 for HM. Right now, I'm trying to stay in the 60 mpw range and I've just started to do some sharpening workouts so that I can see where I'm at in some 5K-10K races this spring before turning my attention this summer to a fall marathon. I want to see how close I am to my 2004 fitness and then take it from there. I don't have a specific time goal for 5k, 8k, and 10k yet. My only real time goal for 2006 is to run a Marathon PR in October. I'm not really sure yet how realistic that is, but that feels like a challenging yet somewhat realistic number to shoot for. And if I do better my PR there's a good chance I'll end up in the 1st coral at Boston '08, which would be nice. I'll post summaries of my last few weeks and then from here on out, I'll post my training weekly. Questions, comments and advice welcome.

Week beginning 3/19/07 -- 60 miles in 7 runs. Key workout # 1 -- 14-mile long run at easy/medium pace to work Key workout # 2 -- 13 miles on the roads including a 7-mile progression run from 7:05 down to 6:03 pace. Also did strides during 2 easy runs. Week beginning 3/26/07 -- 54 miles in 6 runs. Key workout #1 -- 14-mile long run at moderate pace with a bit of a progression. key workout #2 -- 13 including 8 x 400 @ 3k pace Did strides 2x. Week beginning 4/2/07 -- 60 miles in 7 runs. Key workout #1 -- 14 mile long run at an easy pace (not fully recovered from Sunday's 400s) Key workout #2 -- 13 including 6 x 1000m at ~10k with 200m jogs, 4 miles easy, then 4 x 30 seconds FAST Did strides 2x.

Awesome, Mike. Looking forward to this. Pretty solid high school times, there. Just curious--what was your high school program like?

Excellent! Will be checking this chronicle religiously. In your first 50 mpw base what sort of schedule were you running ? Were you running everyday then ? Curious as I"m trying to get up to that for the summer before marathon training starts in September..

Yes, once I ramped up to about 50 and got used to that workload I was pretty much running every day. A typical week toward the end of last summer looked like this: Mon - 6 EZ Tues - 7 EZ with strides Wed - 9 with 8 x 2 min hard / 1 min easy Thu - 6 EZ Fri - 7 EZ with strides Sat - 6 EZ Sun - 13 with a progression or 3 x 8 min at tempo or something

Awesome, Mike. Looking forward to this. Pretty solid high school times, there. Just curious--what was your high school program like?

Thanks! My high school program was pretty stacked. We went 30 years without losing a dual meet (I was there for years 14-17 of "The Streak.") We won our State class meet twice while I was there and won the state relays all 4 years, indoor and outdoor. I was a solid varsity runner but nothing special--probably 4th or 5th fastes on my team at 800 and maybe 7th or 8th at 400. I only ran the mile twice in dual meets where my coach knew we wouuld win by 50 points and just put a bunch of guys in different events for training. Both times I ran the mile I won by a large margin against weak teams and a bunch of underclassmen from my own team. So that PR is probably soft... Modified to add: And another thing...all my H.S. PR's are from my Junior year b/c I was injured most of my senior year.

Modified to add: And another thing...all my H.S. PR's are from my Junior year b/c I was injured most of my senior year.

Interesting... those times are right on what I ran my junior year in HS. My mile was a bit faster, but like you say, a 2:03 translates to 4:3x in the right circumstances. I dunno what that means, except to say that I don't think it's a bad thing to be thinking under 2:57 this October.

Anyhow, I'm very happy to see that you've progressed beyond your silly track circles. I mean, you ran a 5k in amazing time but didn't stop there. Then a 10k, then a half-marathon... then an insanely fast marathon.

Actually you got it all backwards. I ran track in H.S (I also ran a couple of road races back then and quite probably ran a 5K faster than 17 min, I don't honestly remember, but that's not important now.) Then my next race was a marathon like 12 years later. Then my next race after that was a marathon a year and a half later. Then I started running 5K's etc and actually learned how to train. It just looks neat and planned out when I summarize like above. Believe me, I made ALL the mistakes everyone always cautions new runners against. Some of them I'm glad I did. And I loved the track. Another goal for this year is to race on the track again.

70 miles a week.... yeah my mom is insane... She does 2 workouts a day... I'd never do doubles. It's a whole routine for me. Get up, eat, run, shower. The shower closes the deal. It's like a beautiful full circle. Sweat during the run, wake up during the run, refresh with a hot shower. Done. Doing that two times a day just reopens the circle and you can't open the circle again until the next day 'cause that's how it's supposed to be. I'm typing this thinking of Seinfeld saying "once you close the circle you just can't open it again." hehe How are you feeling today? I gotta see if you ran yet. Probably! Any big plans for the Saturday run?