Day 35 - Keep It Simple

Here's the thing about running schedules, if you have one that fits you, its like gold.  For me the golden ticket is the Hal Higdon Intermediate II Marathon Training Program. I'm on week eight and I have been pretty true to the effort.  This is what it looks like:

Talk to a novice marathoner or someone who is on to their second marathon and chances are they will tell you, "I used the Hal Higdon program to get ready.  Here's a picture of my schedule's author Hal Higdon.  He's 84 years old and still looking good.

Here's me when I started:

You can look other postings in this Blog and see what I look like now.  But I digress!

The written program looked so darn ominous when I started.  It was just numbers on a page. As I have continued, I now see that its the kind of art that made Van Gogh famous, and you get to keep your ears.  When you look at the schedule and then experience the theory behind it, you see the simplicity.  You rest and then stress your body. Rest is just as important as the running.  On Wednesdays and on the weekends you have your longer runs. The other two running days are maintenance efforts.  The cross training works on muscles your running form does not address, and then muscles that oppose those that you use for running.  Genius. Even this weekend, I am running a marathon in total for the two days.  

So far so good.  Not injured.  Not overtired. Moving to a rhythm. I'm observing the secret of life and the motto for all happy people, "Keep it simple."  Now that's a running plan.