While I'm back to somewhat serious training, as the memory of my early December marathon fades and I look ahead to the Carlsbad 5000 in April, I'm not exactly back to high mileage. In October and November I was running 60-80 miles a week. This week I'll run about 30 miles. And I'm loving it. I feel good every day. I mean, I have that hold-me-back, I'm-ready-to-race feeling every time I lace up my shoes and start. I had forgotten that such a thing was possible. While I was certainly fitter last fall, I was lucky then to feel so good even once a week due to all the fatigue I was carrying from one workout to the next.

I'm also enjoying running fast. Today I did a seven-mile run that included 10 all-out uphill sprints of 10 seconds apiece. Let me tell you, 100 seconds of uphill sprinting is a good, solid training stimulus, but it's a total blast, and over with so quickly. Somewhat experimentally, I'm trying to do some hard running in almost every workout. I want to see how my body responds to a low-mileage, very-high-intensity approach to training for this 5K.

The backbone of my training will be a series of workouts focused on my goal race pace of 5:05 per mile. I will start this week with a session consisting of 10-12 x 400 meters in 76 seconds. Over the next several weeks I will gradually increase the distance of the intervals I run at this pace, to 600 meters, then 800 meters, then 1K, and eventually a full mile. My hardest workouts will be a session consisting of 5 x 1K @ 3:10 with only a 200-meter jog recovery between intervals and another consisting of 3 x 1 mile @ 5:00 with a 90-second recovery between intervals.

I can hardly wait until I'm actually fit enough to do these workouts!