No Frills

These old legs have been feeling heavy and tired after XC racing and that super long run this weekend. A nice and supposedly easy 5m on Monday was a reminder of the necessity of these recovery days being exactly that. I dragged myself around the village at dawn wearing a pair of wooden legs wondering where my bouncy & bendy ones had got to.

The last few days have included lots of reflective training chats with M, his pa and some revisiting of our dog-eared running books. I've also been looking back at what I've done since I started a structured training plan two years ago, (a great advantage of keeping a log). All these elements have combined to form a really useful process; reminding myself of the running basics that I've somehow forgotten in recent months.

In trying to capture what made all the difference to bring the big improvements over the last 2 years, one of the most striking things was the simplicity of my training. My efforts to find new and sophisticated ways of doing intervals or drills or some other fancy session is all a bit unnecessary. I've been reminded of the basics, proper recovery around high quality work. Giving the body enough space to respond to hard training is a key discipline and rather crazily, is just as tough for me as it is churning out those yucky intervals at the track. The wild distractions of hilly drills and the like all now seem to be just a bit of nonsense. Keeping it simple is the Runningbear motto. So tonight, simple hills, definitely no drills & no more frills.