This morning I ran another 5.0 mile run and really focused on my landing and increasing my cadence. I was very careful to not stress my hamstrings and backed off when I felt myself tightening up.
However, my perceived effort did not feel as bad as yesterday, the couple of days off helped and reducing my mileage this week is really helping.
It was already in the 80’s when I ran, but humidity was a lot lower than it has been, which felt good!
I was able to maintain my:
- landing
- lift
- lean
without the same level of focus that I had to use yesterday. I just felt more fluid and comfortable with this form again, it is the one that I purposely worked on right up until the middle of May. It is amazing how quickly were revert to a different style of running – based up the shoes being worn.
At least that is what I believe based upon my experience over the last few months, where I have worn different shoes and those shoes have promoted different styles of running.
So how did the run go? Even though my hamstrings are still a little tight, they didn’t bother during the run and even though I didn’t feel like I was working very hard, I ran a new course PR by almost 45 seconds.
- 1.0 mile – 7:56
- Turnaround – 19:45
- Last Split – 20:47
I definitely ran slower coming back, but my focus was more on ensuring that I was maintaining my form and keeping my cadence up, than pushing myself. I was tired after I finished, but not hurting, which was good.
On my birthday TheWife got me Tread Lightly by Peter Larson and Bill Katovsky, for my birthday Monday and I only have 2 chapters left to read. The book is validating many of things that I have been doing to try to improve my running form or providing me the rationale behind many of the changes that I have tried to make, over the past year.
So far, I am really enjoying the book and will be doing a full review later in the week. It is also the reason that I have not been on a lot of social media sites this week, I’ve been busy reading 
.
2 comments
Aaron Smith
August 8, 2012 at 10:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It does seem like you’ve “dialed it in” which makes me wonder, what are yor specific goals for a marathon?
Harold L. Shaw
August 9, 2012 at 8:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Smiddy my goal for “running” a marathon is to first be able to run it without my knee going bonkers (the last 2 I have trained for my left knee doesn’t like the 20+ part and then qualify for Boston, which means that I have to run a sub 3:40, a sub 3:35 would be closer to what I probably need to actually get in. If I can do that, I would be pretty darn happy.