Introducing myself: My name is Tom, I live in Raleigh nc. I ran a lot from the time I was 8 all the way through high school. I had some disappointments in high school and was a little burned out so I stopped after HS, moved to the beach and started surfing. Fifteen years later I have moved away from the beach for career, married and getting ready to start a family. I live in Raleigh NC now, which is a pretty athletically active town. Lots of runners and bikers around here. I started running about a year ago. I was about 30 lbs overweight and had been living a sedentary lifestyle for the last few years. When I started running again, I can actually recall it taking effort to run 12min miles for just 3 miles. A far cry from being able to run 16min 5ks during cross country in HS.
It didn't take long before I started wanting to get more serious. Unlike a typical newby had some pretty good left over knowledge from when I was a young runner. I started build up to running about 30 to 50 minutes a day, everyday. Within a short time I ran an 8k in 49:12 last april. My first race really put the hook in me. As I wanted to get more serious I also realized that in HS, I had plenty of time and freedom to train. In talking it over with the wife, we decided that a maximum of 7 hours a week toward training would be it. My first goal was to see how mileage I could cover in 7 hrs per week, without over doing it. I made a schedule that would allow me to build up slowly to about 40 miles per week. Given the pace I was running that was a good estimate. I ran everyday starting with just 15 min runs the first week at a slow 12min/mile pace. Each week I would increase my mileage by about 10% eventually over about a 5 or 6 month period I was covering close to 40 miles a week and doing a 2hr long run on Sundays of about 10-11 miles. I ran the Va beach RnR half marathon back in September. I ran great the first 10 miles (sub 1:40:00) but then ran out of gas and finished in about 2:15:00. Shortly after that race, I had reached my mileage goal. Meeting this goal was a big deal to me because I now knew the ideal mileage for me to train at.
I could now start to get more serious and start to build some speed. I started to train for a 10k in November. In the process of doing more long interval training and tempo runs, I suffered a hip injury. I took a couple of weeks off. When it healed up again I started back up. With interrupted training, I managed to finish a 10k in 53:23. I big improvement. I took another week off and decided to start training for a 10k this coming april. I planned out 6 months of training, build up to 40/week in a matter of 6 weeks this time. I started doing some interval work again. This time the difference is I only run 6 days a week. With only 3 hard days, 1 Long Run, 1 Interval run, 1 moderately distanced tempo run and 3 short very easy recovery runs or x-train. Since my pace is much faster now I can cover 40miles a week in fewer workouts.
I still got injured again recently. This time, I determined it was due to muscle imbalance, So I started doing core training. I am now back on my program with a goal of running a 10k on April 12 in under 47min and a goal of running the 8k in early may in 35min. After that I will take a short rest and start training for marathons in the fall.
