new shoes, new training cycle

My new shoes are the Brooks Cascadia 7 - I've had them out on the road for a couple of days now, and they are very comfortable.  I like them a lot.

new Brooks Cascadia 7 shoes

We've had great sunny days, really great winter running weather. My mileage has been low, but all of a sudden I'm anxious to get back to some real road work. Some time off from running really can be a good thing - but I have a lot of work to do to meet my goal for the year of running the Comrades ...

So, how am I training? I want to build on what I've done on the past, but pay more attention to running efficiency and speed. Here is a top-level view of my plan and why I think it's reasonable.

I can look back at years worth of running logs, and see that running 45 miles a week is a relatively high workload for me. 45 miles at an easy pace (just over 10 minute miles) is 450 minutes (7.5 hours) of running. Using Daniels' point system, doing these easy runs only would put me at 75 points a week.

The change I am making this training cycle is to introduce more 'quality' into my running. Spending some more time at marathon and threshold pace during the week, and adding some 10K races on weekends will put me over 100 points for the week. I have weekly runs of 15+ miles, and will run one marathon, but nothing longer than that before Comrades.

Reasonableness check: For one thing, based on my own experience, I can't train much harder than this, and I don't want to get injured, so this is what I should do. With my (limited) natural ability, I've previously beat the cutoff in a number of ultraruns - I'm expecting that the added focus on running efficiency and speed is going to help give me my best shot at finishing Comrades.

Mike's pacing by heartrate

• Easy (~70% HR max, 115 bpm)
• Marathon pace (80% HR max, 130 bpm)
• Threshold (88% HR max, 142 bpm)
• 10K (> 90% HR max, 145 bpm)