Also, if you don't know what aerobic and anaerobic are, in layman's terms aerobic is when you're breathing is either easy or hard but still controlled. Anaerobic is more like when you're exhausted and perhaps gasping for air. (Also, being anaerobic will make you fatigue extremely quickly, especially if you've never practiced it in training.)

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"It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster...Stretch out our arms farther--And one fine morning......"
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

at this time of the season, it will be better for you to let the speed come to you. If you run at a moderately fast pace, but still stay comfortable, you will be getting a great base for your season. At this point, you will want to run one or two moderatly hard workout per week, but don't kill those either. Steady work with occasional easy weeks will give you the safest and most surefire build up available.

I would suggest that you keep your easy runs easy because they allow your body to recover and push your hard runs as hard as you possibly can. This will give you the most improvement possible without overduing it. If you never want to be a good runner, then listen to CoachB and never give it your all.??? The more intense your hard runs are, the faster you'll improve, but if you do them every day, you won't give your muscles a chance to repair themselves. The easy runs are a chance to stay loose and help them get back to the way they were before you worked the **** out of em.

Whatarun

I am going to have to disagree with you here. At this early point of the season, sacrificing good training days to recovery from over hard workouts is not the best way to go. You are trying to get in shape so that you can "get in shape" later on. Without much of a base, the body can adapt pretty fast to hard workouts, but, I have found that athletes have a hard time maintaining hard training for more than a month. If you build a good base with moderatly hard work, but never killing yourself, you can have good training days every day of the week. Going really hard on your hard day forces an overly easy run on your recovery days.

In addition, going really hard, over your head ability wise, has not been shown to result in long term performance gains. Researchers MacDougal and Sale, described the proper training intensities back in 1981. They found that the greatest gains in VO2 max were associated with work right at that intensity or slightly below (Canadian Journal of Sports Medicine). Additionally, they pointed out that going too far over your VO2 max pace only resluted in shortening the length of your workout and subsequently decreasing the time that you are able to apply the proper training stimulus. (ie. if you are a 10:00 min 2 miler, it is better to run 8x800 at 2:30-2:34 with relatively short recovery than it is to run 4x800 at 2:18-2:22 with longer recovery.)

This is not to say that you should never run above your VO2 max or try to flood your muscles with lactate. Of course it must be done in order to teach your body to buffer high acidity levels. However, you don't need to do this type of work that much to get the benefit of it. And you certainly don't need to do it in January if you goal race is in May.

If you don't believe me, ask the all americans I've coached. One is running at Columbia right now.

Sincerely,
Joel Bernard, MS