Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Shifting plateaus


After a training spell of logging hundreds of miles, doing countless hill repeats and pushing through tempo run after tempo run, one day you may notice a shift, if lucky, to a higher level of fitness. I think I may have just experienced such a shift. Not a major jump, but an encouraging inching up to a higher plateau.

What are the indicators you might ask? In my case, in this instance, they are:
  • markedly less jiggling when I run
  • more energy (this morning after my 12 mile run, I found myself tapping my foot to some music on the radio - rather inconvenient since I was trying to shave my legs at the time)
  • my 2 hour 23 minute run felt like a short outing (it helped that Amie was with me for 90 minutes of it and the last 16 minutes of it were with Taz)
  • continually looking for excuses to get up, get out, get at 'em

Hopefully this means: a) my cutback week is working; and b) my planned continued build-up will go smoothly!

By the way, the picture above was from an earlier, more dramatic plateau shift. This picture was taken July 18, 2007 on the Mountain-Bay Trail in Wisconsin - 43 days and 1,035 miles into my run from Colorado to Michigan, and only a few days after finally figuring out how to properly/fully fuel my body throughout the day. What a difference! Nothing was going to stop me now!

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