When is not enough, too much?

Beware, running is highly addictive.

Once you begin and find a rhythm in your run, it becomes habit forming. Once you run one mile, you'll strive for two. Enter your first race, and you'll look forward to the next, hoping to feel better during the run and improve your time. How do you do that? You train harder. This can be some combination of running more miles, cross training with weights, biking, swimming and running at a faster pace. Once you get some positive feedback by bettering your time, you might try a longer race. Here you'll find more experienced runners who have already been thru what you are experiencing. Naturally you are competitive, so what to do? You train harder!

This, my friends is where we get into trouble. We find ourselves overly tired, our body starts to fight back with aches and pains in places we are not used to, and we lose some of the fun of running. When training for a marathon, there is the feeling that you can never train too much, that the race is so long and difficult, you always need to ratchet up the intensity level from one week to the next, to get stronger. Like most things in life, you need to find the right balance in training. Not too much, not too little.... just right! This requires patience, forced days off for rest, and a keen sense of listening to your body. When your body aches too much, back off for a day or two.

When I was starting out, my theory was anything worth doing was worth doing to excess. Use this theory in training and you are sure to burn out! My current theory is, rest is as important as running.

So Saturday is a well deserved day of rest, and Sunday is a group 18 miler.

Stay tuned!