Tarmac Meditations-No Plan is Not a Plan

If you have no plan, and I mostly don’t, then training is where you find it. When you are young and working out physically at both work and play, as I was, training kind of happened. When I swam competitively or ran track the training sessions were there to be attended, the events a matter of finding the competitors entrance after you got off the bus. The years gone by come to require more planning. The Internet is filled with training plans for runners. The gal in the picture probably hasn’t read one of them. She trains with the Joe Henderson Marathon Team; she has trained with them now for nearly six years.  The long runs, the key to both the program’s success and the intense loyalty of its participants to the marathon and the coach, are on Sundays. She, Jean, has shown up for nearly all of them. She has run 17 marathons, some faster, some slower, all steady as she goes. Her plan requires balancing kids, her mother, her job, her commute, her social life, her fabulous chocolate chip cookies and like that. A life. I have read all of the training plans although I quit that after I started to run again for the pleasure/pain/ prayer-like aspects of running into my sixties. It occurred to me just now that I haven’t been running long( long distance) since my surgeries, but it is time to remember  no plan is not a plan; that a plan can  be  simple.  And I ought to have one. Run a mile, see how you feel is a plan. Run every weekday for a mile or more, take a day off every now and then and run longer by twice one day on the weekend is a plan. Run long on the weekend, increasing by 5% if every week, by 10% if every other week is plan. Run daily, run slowly, don’t eat like a pig is a plan. Ernst Van Aaken said that. Part of any running plan is to go to a good running store, assess if they know what they are doing; one criteria is that there are all types of people (bodies) selling, it is quiet, there is a sense of running history in the place, there is treadmill or other such for stride analysis, there are running groups for all levels that are organized out of the store. So why say all this? On account of  I need to remember what I know. I took a rest day on Friday, felt lousy yesterday, Saturday, and worked early this morning; it will be three days without running, let alone running slowly or long, and the eating like a pig thing, well, it was not my best food weekend.  So. A plan. Run daily, write it down. Run slowly, as if I had more than one speed. Write it down. Run long, two hours building to four on the weekend. Rest the other day. Write it down. Don’t eat like a pig; keep track of the fuel input says  Matt Fitzgerald so as to support the output for more fun and better health. Write it down. Going to lift now, chop wood later, and write down my goals for the week. Now’s there’s a plan, inside the other plan if you see what I mean.