Breaking the Addiction

This post is following up on my “more to come” statements at the end of the past two day’s posts. As I began to get healthier over the past couple weeks, I started to think about training plans and how to go about getting back in shape while keeping myself healthy. The problem is, it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t even know where to start.

My first thought was simply to go back to some of my best racing periods from the past and mimic the training I did then. However, in reviewing my old logs, I noticed a problem. While I found some really great workouts that worked well for me and some things I could definitely see myself using in the future, knowing what I know now, the training itself was probably less than optimal, particularly when it came to the way it was laid out. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure which workouts to start out with or where to place them in a schedule, and I was over-thinking the whole thing big time. This has always been a problem of mine. I know what I need to do, but I second guess myself and generally wind up adding way too much work way too often and we all know what that leads to. I’ve always said that I can coach others much more easily than I can coach myself because I’m way too analytical and not nearly objective enough when it comes to my own training (I always think I can handle more than I can). I think of lot of runners actually have that problem.

In any event, I realized I needed to get some assistance before Evil Steve took over as my coach and led me right back where I’ve been over and over the past several years, so I hesitantly reached out to Howard Nippert to see if he would be willing to work with me again. I say hesitantly because I feel like I’ve wasted Howard’s time for quite a while now by not listening to what he said and completely changing around the schedules he gave me (generally adding lots of additional work). Fortunately for me, Howard is not only a good friend but he’s also been in the same boat I’m currently in, and therefore he was not only willing to take me on as a major project once again but is the perfect person to do so.

My first e-mail from him started out telling me that he’d heard the same story from me before, and he’s right. He has. However, as I told him, all the 4-5 week injuries were bad enough to make me talk about changing my ways, but not enough to make me follow through. This one was finally significant enough to make me really commit to change. My next e-mail started out with this: “Alright. This is how we go about this from now on.” And from there he proceeded to lay out the new plan.

To make a long story short, he basically told a full blown addict to quit cold turkey. Mileage has always been my crack, but as he put it, “the madness ends now.” To make it end, I really need to stop paying attention to the numbers, so I’m going with my runs recorded in minutes not distance. Sure I’ll have a pretty good idea of what distance I cover for any given run, but when I get to “X” number of minutes I’m stopping. That’s it. The hard truth of the matter is nobody at a race cares who ran the most miles or the most hardcore workouts over the past month. All that matters is who crosses the line first and who runs fast times. That’s what I want to do. Get results, not pad my log book.

So going forward I won’t be altering workouts, adding on, or doing anything else. I will be taking the provided schedules and putting a check mark by each day. It’s not going to be completely easy, but I’m convinced that it’s not only what I need to do but it’s what will help get me where I want to be. In the end, that’s what really matters. It should be a fun and interesting adventure, and I’m looking forward to the process and where it leads.

And so my recovery from mileage addiction begins.