Creeping up to the magical 40 miles / week running right now. There are always those things you wish you could tell your younger self – I’ve been thinking a lot about that this summer as I close in on another decade. I’ve rediscovered the joy of long, slow runs. My training has historically been spotty except when training for a race, where I’ll get more disciplined about periodized training and making sure the build is coming on slow and I’m “generally” prepared (physically) for a hard effort.

I wish I had run more slow miles in the past 20 years.

It’s a really hard concept to grasp, when you train hard, you get results, no pain no gain. It’s true to some extent, but there is another way.

In May I started running just base miles. Keeping an eye on heart rate only, not pace. At all. I’ve changed my primary routes to be relatively flat. It’s boring. It’s painfully slow. But then things started to click.

My Heart Rate Variability jumped and has been consistently balanced. I started sleeping better. My overall “productive” indicator of fitness load (according to Garmin) stayed in the Maintaining state. I haven’t had any fatigue after 7 – 10 miles runs. I’ve been following up a 10 mile run with a 5 miler the next day.

On the long, slow runs I would think about building the aerobic base. Building a big engine. And musculoskeletal adaptation. Most of May I ran in the MAF zone (maximum aerobic function), for me about 131 bpm. I could read a book out loud at that pace. It’s slow.

In the past 5 weeks I started to mix it up by climbing up to aerobic threshold (Zone 2). If the terrain was a little hilly, I would allow my system to jump up to threshold, north of 155, then on the descent, pump the brakes and bring the system back down to 130 bpm.

Over the next few weeks I’ll start to mix in some anaerobic threshold work – probably hill repeats, and continue to increase the long runs. The long term goal is to polarize the training, 80% slow Zone 1 engine building. 20% hammering VO2 Max expanding. Nothing in between.

Last Sunday I set out on an empty stomach from my house to the top of Council Crest – 14 miles round trip. I carried with me a collapsible water bottle and 2 gels. Around 6 miles at the start of the long climb up to the park, I filled my bottle up and ate one gel. The volcanoes were socked in at the top, so I didn’t get any views. A quick turnaround back to downtown and then I filled by bottle again near PSU and ate another gel (caffeinated this time). It was like rocket fuel. I felt great climbing back out of the valley to home. It was the chillest 14 miler I’ve ever run. I thought about taking a lap around Mt. Tabor, but I needed to get home. Heart rate was in Zone 2 most of the run, until I started to open it up a few miles from home on the hills.

I’m not sure what to do with this fitness. Maybe a Fall marathon, maybe something bigger. I feel the pull of another 100 miler. I know I can PR my second one. There is some wisdom coming to bear. We’ll see.

I didn’t even know Tool released a new album (2019?). I’m a sucker for prog rock. This song makes me think of warfighters in Ukraine. Or maybe old rock stars, or old adventurers.

Hey you! You should do that thing you’ve been putting off – start tomorrow when you wake up. Slava Ukraini! Memento mori.