An elite runnerI forget which onemade an interesting point in an online interview I read a couple of months ago. He said that if you want to achieve your very best in races, you have to take risks in training. In other words, if you train cautiously and conservatively all the time, you can more or less guarantee that you will arrive at the starting line healthy, but at the same time, you are guaranteeing that your race result will be something less than the result you would achieve if you trained more aggressively and got a little lucky.

The title of my last post was "Discretion Is the Better Part of Valour." I stand by the point I made in that post--namely, that we must resist the temptation to push through "red flag" musculoskeletal pains in training. But at the same time I fully agree with the elite runner who pointed out the necessity of taking some chances in the training process. ("Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.") You just have to do it wisely.

In my Tuesday tempo run last week I experienced a painful hamstrings twinge and immediately shut down my workout. Over the next three days I ran by feel, maintaining a slow pace and stopping completely when the lingering soreness reached an unacceptable level. Happily, I was able to run slightly farther each day. This was the experience that reminded me of the importance of holding to a zero-tolerance policy toward injury pain in training.

Had I been content to be really conservative, I would have continued running slow and short until my hamstrings felt 100% free of lingering soreness. But I am determined to set a marathon PR in December. This will require that I train harder than ever on a consistent basis. So after three days of training very lightly I was feeling the need for another strong training stimulus--that is, another tough workout. If I can't complete a tough workout at least once every three days consistently over the next 14 weeks, my race will be disappointing whether I remain healthy or not.

I normally do my long runs on Saturday, and Saturday fell four days after my muscle twinge this past week. I decided to start my planned workoutan 18-mile run at a moderately aggressive paceand hope for the best. If my hamstrings felt merely iffy, I would keep running. I would wait until I knew for sure the muscle was on a downward spiral towards a severe strain, before stopping. I made it 9 miles before I began to be somewhat concerned. The pain was more intense and widespread than when I started, but still not quite a red flag. I decided to stop if it got even one tiny bit worse. I made sure my route consisted of endless loops around my neighborhood, so I wouldn't have far to walk if it came to that.

But it never came to that. The pain levelled off and then actually began to decrease in the final miles of the run. I wound up running the full 18 in 2:04:53, or 6:56/mile, running the last 8 at 6:48/mile in 90-degree heat. That's a very storng performance for me, and so a workout that could have been disastrousor might not have happened at all, if I had been too conservativeturned out to be a terrific endurance-building stimulus and a great confidence builder. It also served to remind me of the need to "choose your spots"to take calculated risks every now and thenif you want to raise your running performance to the next level.