Let's see what to discuss this week...UMiami is in first place in their division (sorry had to throw that in there). Had some nice workouts this week, and pushed myself a little to hard too. Also, I signed up for the City of Angels Half-Marathon on December 7th, so I am very excited about that. That leaves about two more training weeks and then a slight taper week. With how well my workouts have been the last two weeks or so I am hoping to have a good result. I think I have a shot at breaking 1:30, but that is only if everything goes very well during the race.

I read something this week about increasing stride length, and it said to increase length you want to extend your leg as far behind yourself as you can. I had always thought this to mean that you should bring your feet up closer to you butt, however now I think this means before you pick your feet up off the ground, i.e. to get as much push off as you can. Applying this will take some getting used to because to get a stronger push off I think I need to contact the ground more midfoot than forefoot. Anyway's I had one run this week where I used this method to good effect. I was able to maintain a decent pace, and kept my heart rate low. The other days my calves were a little too worn out to run with proper form.

I am still experimenting with pre-long run meals. This week I tried having a bowl of granola with soy milk and a banana. I like the granola because it is very dense with calories. In fact the night before I measured out three servings because it looked so small and I thought I would get hungry, but two servings was plenty. It is a little difficult to judge if this meal is good enough for performance to be my new pre-long run meal because there were some other factors during Sunday's run that effected my performance. In particular, the air quality was poor and we ran a wood-chip trail today. However, I think it might be my new favorite, and I will try it again next week.

Training this week was very good. I ran too hard on Wednesday (was racing a friend), which made Friday's tempo run a little more challenging but I still had a very nice workout.

Last weeks training:

• Tuesday - 6.06 Mile Easy/Fartlek Run - 47:15 min, 7:45 pace

• Wednesday - 5.31 Mile Easy Run - 40:39 min, 7:39 pace

• Thursday - 4.91 Mile Easy Run - 39:34 min, 8:03 pace

• Friday - 7.00 Mile Tempo Run - 50:27 min, 7:12 pace - Warm up, 5 Miles at 6:55 pace, cool down

• Sunday - 9.88 Mile Long Run - 1:18:52 min, 7:58 pace

Stupid ankles and their proclivity to bend in ways they are incapable of bending. This week I rolled my ankle up pretty good, but it was on Saturday so I still got most of the weeks training in. I skipped my long Sunday run, which stinks, but I think by Tuesday I will be ready to go. Aside from trying to run on the top of my foot on Saturday the rest of the weeks training went quite well.

As I said last week I have increased my caloric intake a bit this week and it helped a lot. I have had more energy this week during training and my tempo run was much better. However, I think that I might be overdoing the calories a little bit, so I have a new, new plan (of course I do). I think this week I am going to focus on eating carbohydrates immediately before and after training. This is essentially what I did last week, but I didn't change my eating habits the rest of the day. I plan to reduce my carb intake in the morning (for afternoon runs) to offset the increase in carbs before and after my run. My thought has been that I needed morning carbs to replenish my glycogen stores, but considering my training is only an hour or so a day I should never need to tap into the glycogen in my muscles if I have enough carbs in my system. So hopefully this plan will still give me proper energy and reduce my calorie intake a little bit.

I didn't mention it last week, but I have started to implement principles of the Pose method of running. My form was similar in style to pose before I had even heard of the method. Essentially what the method mandates is to use gravity to propel yourself forward. This is done by leaning forward and then lifting your feet off the ground virtually straight under the body. In your stride your feet never really get ahead of your hips. This does a few things that, to me at least, seem more efficient. First is that you end up landing midfoot or even closer to the balls of you feet, which is generally thought to cause fewer injuries than landing on your heal. Second is you remove the 'braking' effect that you get when your feet get ahead of your hips. Because you are using your feet as a pivot it doesn't seem like they are slowing you done, but by landing with your feet ahead of your hips you are actually applying the brakes a little bit.

The biggest changes for me regarding the Pose method is lifting my feet straight up, and maintaining a constant stride rate. I guess lifting my feet is in conjunction with leaning forward because you wouldn't want to lift straight up if you weren't leaning forward. So increasing my lean is another change. I need to strengthen my hamstrings a little before I can use this method with any speed because it takes a lot of strength in the hamstrings to maintain a constant stride rate while lifting your feet high enough to generate a lot of speed. The constant stride rate idea is not something I am totally convinced about. For my easy runs I have tried to shorten my stride and maintain a constant rate, but this pushes my heart rate much to high for an easy run. The problem with slowing your stride rate is that you tend to bounce up and down a lot because the balls of your feet can't support your weight for the increased amount of time. I am still figuring out how best to run at an easy pace, but I think I prefer a slower stride rate and longer strides.

Also, I am going to change my schedule a little bit. I am moving my Saturday easy run to Thursday so I can run with the team and then move my speedwork to Friday. That way I will have a rest day before the Sunday long run and it will make doing speedwork easier (no more running with the team followed by speedwork). 

Last weeks training:

• Tuesday - 6.09 Mile Easy Run - 50:31 min, 8:17 pace

• Wednesday - 6:17 Mile Easy Run - 49:59 min, 8:06 pace

• Thursday - 7.52 Mile Tempo Run - 58:08 min, 7:43 pace - 2.8 miles at 6:57 and .4 miles at 6:22 (for fun)

• Saturday - 4.57 Mile Easy Run - 39:13 min, 8:34 pace