[^ full, unnecessary quote for Mike's reading displeasure]Hahaha Lee! Well, let's just say your my guinea squirrel... Just kidding. I was really noticing some big improvements fast by running 5 days successively a week. My legs were feeling pretty beat up by the end of the week which makes me think that maybe it's something I only do for 2-3 weeks at a time only, and then I will switch up to the 3 days a week running.
(paragraph insert just for mike's reading pleasure)
The reason why I worry about total mileage is it seems if I go over a certain limit I seem to end up hurt. So far by staying right at 18 miles a week or under I am doing fantastic and so I don't want to mess with that. Tomorrow I will do 4-5.5 miles of hills and will end with 16.5 to 18 miles for the week. I also don't want my weekly mileage to drop significantly and me to lose whatever I may have just built up, so that's also why I want to make sure I bump the length of these 3 runs up just a touch.
Yah, we'll see how it goes. Any one of the 'recovery' runs I got scheduled is voidable at the least sign of trouble or fatigue. I also like the new, shorter, daily st sessions. If I miss one, it's easy to make up the following day by combining it with the next, and I don't feel such a burden to get through the whole thing. Yesterday it was great looking at my list and seeing just 6-7 different exercises to get through.
I think most trainers say that weekly mileage is something worth keeping track of, and the 10% rule is for mpw, right? They're probably right, it's just not something I think about when deciding how far to run on any particular day, although I have had the goal of getting up in the 25-30 mpw range for some time now. I think I'm getting close.
I'm also really bad about sticking to my three-kinds-of-runs-per-week formula, and I'll probably get worse now that I'm running first thing in the morning, because I don't really see myself doing hills or intervals or even a tempo run when it's dark out. Maybe after I've adapted a bit more . . . right now I'm running pretty slow, but somehow it doesn't feel plodding like before. Maybe because with almost no one around, I get into that deep running zone even better on the early morning runs. The form feels pretty effortless these days.