Slow or Fast?

I had this sticker made for my truck last year. Clever! I wish the idea had been mine but it wasn't.

But yeah, LSDs and speed days. I decided to put both into my ultra program since I really have two goals this summer: finish the 50K in October and run a sub-20:00 5K in September. (Actually I have a third goal - to run a marathon, or at least the distance of one, before my 41st birthday in September - but I figure that should be pretty doable after ultra training for 3 months.) Opposite ends of the spectrum of races for sure, but the latter goal is much older and I'm also not quite ready to give up my "glory days" ability to fast.

After reading a lot of stuff on ultra and trail running though, there appears to be a divide on the necessity of speed workouts. Some will say it's more important to put miles in the book since your goal during an ultra is to simply not fall over dead mid-stride, while others say that things like intervals and tempo runs will boost your lactate threshold, subsequently making you stronger overall. Well I certainly don't have enough experience yet to vouch for either school of thought, but I've always been of the opinion that there's never one simple way of getting better. Instead, we should keep the body guessing. Balance and variety are good for us, and recruiting all muscle types will have a better pay off in the end. And really, come on. Going fast is fun!

So in my plan I almost always run long on Sunday morning and do some sort of speed workout on either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. As for what kinds of speed workouts, I'll be doing little more than alternating fartleks, intervals, and a few local 8-10K races. Nothing all out on the races of course, but enough to count them as tempo runs. I just hope that they get me faster because I'm going to lose my freaking mind if I don't get my 5K PR.

Long runs so far are going well, and I'm finally running them at a "conversational pace" that's a tad slower than I used to go. Two runs at PD Canyon that were ~8.5 mi each and a 15.2 mi run through Medi Park this past Sunday that served as a distance PR. Surprisingly too I wasn't that sore afterwards which tells me that the trail running is indeed making me a much stronger runner than I was last year. If I'd tried to run that far last fall, I'd have been hobbling around afterwards for a week. Yet this time I took Monday off and then ran a pretty good pace on the trails this morning. It wasn't overly hot, I didn't tweak my ankle once, and one of the best things of all, I don't have any blisters (knock on wood) because of some sweet socks that were recommended to me. (That and I've finally started some decent man callouses that I've resisted the urge to peel off.) Never underestimate the importance of good socks, folks.

As always, here's a picture taken at the canyon this morning: