April 30

AM: 9 miles easy and slow

My legs still felt crummy. A total day off may be in order this week. I have just one small race left, so it might be worth it. I have all summer to jack my mileage back up again...and I'm already looking forward to that. Some people can get by off of low mileage, and because I chose the parents and geneology that I did, experience that includes this spring has shown I need miles and lots of them to run well. My concern is that mileage is starting to make me like a drug addict, needing more and more to get the "high" (work with me here...keep reading...).

Will I need more and more miles to reap the benefits of training? Has my body adapted to the workload, so that 70 miles or even 80 miles/week just isn't enough? And why the F*** do I need to run more than everyone else to run well?? Arrrrrrrgggh...

Alas, I really have no idea, and bitching about it in my training log sure isn't going to give me any more answers. But, it's good to get some things off my chest.

Actually, I may have some idea. It could very well be that I overraced early on, f***ed up my knee for a couple of weeks during a critical period of training as a result, and crumbled when my actual peak races came around. Whoops.

I'm leaning toward accepting the latter theory, though I think the first series of questions have some merit to them. I will probably learn a few things from my mistakes (or I'd better, anyway).

I do know this: right now, my legs feel like they're going through nicotine withdrawl. Fortunately, it's almost time to regroup and rebuild my mileage base, and I can probably squeeze out a mile PR or decent 5k next week and end the season on a high note. If I were a struggling baseball team, all the work I've put in would give me a strong farm system, so my long-term optimism is high, even if I'm seemingly skeptical of my fitness in the short term. I may be struggling right now, but I swear I'm not on the ledge, even if it may sound like it reading my race reports and godmylegsfeelsobadboohoo every other day on here. Let's all remember: it's just running.




And now I'm going to take this post in a totally unrelated direction, unless the inner shoulder of a cow somehow relates to . The NY Times had an article yesterday about obscure cuts of meat in the grocery store, and how it's easy to get cheap meat right now simply because cuts like these aren't used very often, can be tough if you don't cook them correctly, and generally aren't as pretty as ribeyes and tenderloins. I've been cooking a lot of cuts of meat that I've never heard of lately, simply because I see it, it's cheap and abundant. Last week was a veal blade chop (I think). Generally, cooking the hell out of it over low heat over several hours has done the trick, which the article points out.