Some essential summer reading

Well, summer reading if you're a runner I should say. I've read this article by Lets Run founder Weldon Johnson before and I came across it again the other day. Titled Why I Sucked In College, the piece is an in-depth analysis of Weldon's training and how he came to realize that he was training much too hard on his easy days and thus not running the kind of times he should have been running in races. In a very short time span, Weldon went from not being able to break 30 in the 10K to running 28:06! I'm lucky that I run by myself 99% of the time so I'm not racing my easy runs with a group, but even then I have to constantly remind myself to slow down on the recovery days. I had one of those lightbulb moments on my easy run today. I wanted to run especially easy to make sure I was fully recovered from my race as I have a longer run scheduled tomorrow and a few doubles scheduled for later in the week and then it dawned on me, that my easy days should always feel this easy. Save the hard efforts for the races and hard workouts!