Mid week, prerace blues.

Workouts are posted in the community.

As we get into the next couple of weeks and with many of you getting ready for your big fall races, you've cut back on your volume and are doing faster workouts in preparation for your event. Of course your expectation is that you'll feeling like a milion bucks. Well something happens on the way to the bank, you don't feel like a million bucks. I'm not really sure why this happens but I've experienced it myself. Iwas getting ready for Boton one year and th eweek before I went out for an 8 mile run and man I could barley finish it. I had been averging about 15 miles a day and my long runs were consistently 20 or so miles. So running an easy 8 miler shouldn't be a big thing but it was. I ended up getting 7 minute PR in the race so it enede up not being a big thing. Same thing happened later in the year, I ran a race 2 weeks before another marathon and ended up with one of my slowest 10k's of all time but in th emarathon I took another 3 minutes off my PR from Boston.

Bottom line is that you can't read a lot into how you feel going into your big race and what the outcome will be. If you've done the work and allowed your self to recover through your taper and you follow your race plan (a sound one) it all should work out.

My thoughts on why this happens.

1. I think the quality work is much different than the work you did most of your training cycle, so it takes the body a bit adjust to the higher quality and the speed of the workouts.
2. You're recovering from the higher mileage and are feeling better than you think but you're unknowingly running your runs as little harder than you think.
3. You've been so focused on training hard that when you let up there is a little let down and everything feels a little harder.
4. Your race is coming up and you're getting a little nervous.
5. Your have high expectation of feeling good during your taper and as we know nothing ever meets up to expectations.
6. Your body is in shock from finallly getting rest after a hard training period.
   
7. None of this is based on anything scientific ;)
   

So if you're felling a littlle down and feel that you're not feeling your best as you prepare for youe event don't worry all should be fine. Just have confidence in your hard work, your taperr and your race plan and it should work out.

Mid week workout 9/15-16/09

Good to see so many of you joining the Chuckit community, to take full advantage of that just join a group, if one isn't already set up for a race you're training for then it's easy to start one. The advantage to that is that you'll receive an e-mail once I post your workouts on Tuesday mornings. There should be a group for most of the big races coming up. If you want to stay old school that's fine, just go to the group/community section and you'll find the workouts.
http://www.runningnw.com/index.php?option=com_community&view=frontpage&Itemid=8

I know a bunch of you ran up in Skagit over the weekend, haven't heard any reports back but the results I've seen seem to show most had good runs.

So a lot of you have a Marathon/half coming up in the next 2-3 weeks so lets make sure that your mid week workouts are done with a little extra umph in them. If you need to go a little easier the next day that's fine. You need to take advantage of the few quality workouts you have left so make sure to you give all you have, it'll pay off in the end. Also make sure that your long runs are on the easy side, running them hard will only hurt you as it's time to take the longer stuff easy, you should have done all of that earlier in the summer, can't make up for it now.

Madison Park reminder

Don't forget we'll be meeting at Madison Park starting tomorrow for our long runs for the next couple of months on Saturdays'.

SJJ Half, mid week workout, Madison Park

Great to see everyone out at the race yesterday. Despite a little rain it wan't bad and many of you had great runs with a few PR's thrown in for good measure, a good sign for those with approaching marathons.

the mid week workouts are posted with in each group in the community section of the new site, those of you who have joined the site and the group for your upcoming race should have recieved an e-mail informing you of this.  If you ran yestersday we'll back off the posted workout with a light run and a few easy stides just to stretch things out a bit.

The new community section is working out pretty well on my end (admin) as I figure things out. Now that I turned on the e-mail function you should recieve notifications when I post the workouts. I also loaded a video from Dan's 50 mile run of a couple of weeks ago as well as a nice little slide show of the pics I took yesterday. All work pretty well and the nice thing is that all of you can do this as well.

Don't forget (someone always does) that we'll be meeting at Madison park this week end for out Saturday morning runs for the next couple of months. I'll send out another reminder later in tthe week.

New Roster, Mid week

I would like to use the new community section of the site http://www.runningnw.com I'm working on for the roster. I've put up several groups and some of you have as well and that I appreciate. Once you put one up I can change the group over to me which allows me to post "bulletins" which I'm going to uses to post workout info.if you start a group make sure to let me know so that I can set it up  so that I can post your workouts.

As most know tonight should be the time trial and I spoke to a few of you on Saturday about using the track at Roosevelt HS and I've decided we'll do it on greenlake instead. We'll meet as usual and once we get everyone over the lower woodland track we'll go across the street to the golf course and start from there running a mile towards Super Jock and Jill and then back.  If someone could use their handy dandy garmin to measure a mile from the north end of the golf course towards SJJ that would be awesome. I know some of you run over from the track before hand, you could do it then. Let's a remember though that there are others who use the trail so let's be careful.

Congrats to Brady and Robin for nice performances at Ironman Canada

11:38:33

BRADY

GUSTAFSON

M30-34

71/220

11:49:01

ROBIN

SHERWOOD

M35-39

128/359