Back to Basics

With the summer heat kicking in, I'm going to take a little break from racing and try to pump up the volume so to speak and get ready to rumble in the fall. The plan over the next 3 weeks is build up to 65 a week and to then try to maintain 65-70 for about a month after that, before adjusting the schedule for fall racing. I'm looking forward to a period of increasing my mileage without worrying about race performances for awhile. The past 2 months have been good and I have run more my mileage than I have had since high school/college, but this Spring I've been a little up and down with my races as I've adjusted to the workload. Saturday I was really flat in the Bay Days 5 miler, running 28:59 when I felt like I was in shape to run 5:40 pace (28:20) or a bit faster. I'm chalking it down to running a hard race the weekend before (17:00 5K at Run For The Young) and not recovering as much as I thought I had. Can't remember the last time I raced on back to back weekends. I'm looking forward to getting to a place where I can be consistent in the 70-75 a week range. I don't think I really need to go beyond that unless my racing goals change from my current 5K-8K-10K and cross country focus, but it will be nice to test my limits this summer and fall. I know I can be a pretty solid runner on 40-50 a week, but as I approach 45 in November, I really want to know that I've done all that I could to run my best as a masters competitor.