Hanging out with all the boys

at the, all together now...

Y

M

C

A

Wooooooo!!!

Anyway, Leah and I had an off day from running yesterday so we decided to do some hard-core strength training. Currently, we are on the one-day-a-week plan which is really the two-day-a-week plan but we never make it to the gym on Fridays. This weird life thing keeps getting in the way.

So, this may shock some of you out there, but I'm not a huge guy. Some might go so far at to call me "skinny," although I prefer "lean." Sure, lean implies a certain muscular definition, but it is a much nicer word than skinny and I'm writing this so I get to use whatever words I want. Still, I do not aim to deceive. Let me break it down for you.

Just to give you an idea, here's a recent picture of me. Now don't get me wrong, I'd like to be stronger...I'd like to look like this. However, this requires the lifting of many heavy objects which is really annoying, because they are all so heavy. But I'm doing it. I'm making the trek down to the Y on a weekly basis, slapping a 5 spot on each side of the bar, and pumping away. As you can see, I'm already starting to see some results.

Okay, lest you think I'm a bit of an idiot, let me assure you that I do realize that going to the gym so infrequently isn't going to result in my getting any bigger. Besides, with all the running, I can barely eat enough calories to maintain my weight, let alone get bigger. So, I'm okay with not getting any bigger (that's three sentences in a row with the word "bigger" in them. Anyone have a thesaurus handy?), although I hope to increase my strength a bit with this added gym time which will help with the long runs. After the marathon, I may take advantage of the forced reduction in mileage and work out 3-4 days a week and try to actually increase my muscle mass. After all, if I want to one day qualify for Boston, I'm definitely going to need a bit more general stength. Then I can call myself lean and people won't get all frowny and confused and wonder who I'm talking about when I use this "lean" word.

Later this evening we have 8 miles with 4 at our lactate (lactic? lactose? I'd better look this up) threshold pace. The plan is to warm up for 2 miles, run our 15K pace for 4 miles, and then cool down for 2 miles. The Pfitz book gives two routes for running the lactate (yes, I checked, that's right) threshold pace. For slower runners, they suggest running those middle miles your 15k pace and for faster runners they recommend your half marathon pace for that interval. Now, I certainly think we're fast, but I sort of doubt Pfitz does, so I think we definitely fall in the 15k pace zone. Furthermore, we want to run the marathon at about the same pace as our half marathon, so it wouldn't make sense to run a tempo run at that same speed. We'd never get faster doing that.

So, the plan for those 4 miles is to maintain an 8 minute pace, which is what we did at the Fort Wayne 12k. This run sounds pretty damn challenging; I can't wait.