A very good training week...**** a good week in general (congratulations President Barack Obama). I think my new eating plan is working out the best of everything I have tried so far. To summarize I am doing pretty much what I was doing before except I changed my morning snack to 20g carbs from 15g fat, and I have added a little carb boost on running days before and after the runs when it is most needed. This seems to provide plenty of energy for the runs and I am not gaining any weight which is nice.

One thing I am going to change moving forward is my gait for easy runs. As mentioned previously I have been taking some cues from the Pose method of running. Well, Pose dictates that for easy runs you should maintain the same stride rate, but shorten the length. This method is ok, but now that I am watch my heart rate I noticed that maintaining the same rate keeps my heart rate too high during easy runs. So I think I will work on maintaining my stride length and slow the rate. The only issue I have with this is I am a mid/forefoot runner and by slowing my rate it means I am on the balls of my feet longer. This is very difficult and I usually find myself bouncing up and down too much. I will try to find something in between that works better.

I felt so good that I pushed a little to hard on my tempo and long run this week. During my tempo run on Friday I ran 4 miles at around 6:45 min/mile pace which is 15 seconds faster than I should be. This pushed my heart rate a little too high, so I need to watch out but I prefer going to fast to not finishing the run like I was doing a few weeks back. My long run this week was pretty good. I wanted to do a fast finish and I did this but perhaps a little too fast. I ran at about 6:57 min/mile pace on the second half of the run, which is below my goal half marathon pace. So again too fast, but the second half was mostly downhill so I think the pace was not too extreme.

Also, with my new schedule of doing speed training on Fridays instead of Thursdays I think I am going to use Tuesdays easy run as a semi-speed workout. Try to do some fartleks/strides/fast finishes while running with the team. Hopefully it won't be overtraining.

Last weeks training:

• Tuesday - 5.92 Mile Easy Run - 46:19 min, 7:49 pace
• Wednesday - 5.86 Mile Easy Run - 47:59 min, 8:11 pace
• Thursday - 4.44 Mile Easy Run - 36:23 min, 8:11 pace
• Friday - 6:32 Mile Tempo Run - 44:04 min, 6:58 pace - 1.5 Mile Warm up, 4.2 miles @ 6:46 pace, cool down
• Sunday - 10.7 Mile Long Run - 1:28:36 min, 8:11 pace