Tuesday, January 1, 2008

No Rest Day???

For the past few years in my running, I have rarely run on two consecutive days.  I've been running 3 days a week which allows me to have rest days in between all of my runs.  I believe that I have avoided injuries by resting between runs (and there is research stating that rest days are important for muscles to regenerate and get stronger...).

However, most marathon training programs schedule 4 or 5 runs per week (the program that I'm thinking of using schedules 4 runs per week).  So I ran again today (I ran yesterday too) and I'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow.  I'll try to run again on Thursday and then a long run on the weekend.

I may also start blogging about some of the music that I'm listening to on my runs.  I'm in a phase of running to mellower music - for some reason this relaxes me a bit and allows me to "get lost" in my running.   Today, I threw a few Guster albums in my iPod shuffle before hitting the gym (OK...I whimped out on going outside today - I'll definitely get out in the elements from my long runs)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll share my experience w u for what it's worth. My 1/2 program was a 5 day per wk schedule. It was really hard in the beginning, I hurt all the time. I talked to my coach about cutting back & he told me not to, it just takes time 4 the body 2 adapt 2 all that pounding. I listened & he was right, after about 2 months the pain went away. Also it was nice that if I had to skip a run, I didn't feel so guilty cuz I still would get 4 runs in.

Good luck 2 u - miss u!

Mike Fox said...

I've finished my first week of running 4x per week and I feel pretty good.

I did not do my three weekly runs on consecutive days (one rest day in between runs 2 and 3 due to scheduling issues) and it will most likely happen like that again this week.

However, now I feel a bit more confident to run on consecutive days. We'll see if I still feel that way in a few weeks :-)