Reveling in the cut-back week
Another week of Boston training under my belt, hooray! Last week was a cutback in terms of distance and to a lesser extent, volume. The FF group and I had a good, challenging workout on Wednesday night — repeats of 1 minute on, 1 minute off, x 8, with a 2 minute recovery between sets — totaling just under 7 miles for the night. Saturday we did a simple 10-miler in the city, and the ladies and I managed to run a negative split, which is always a confidence booster. And we ran it pretty quickly, to boot.
When I first began marathon training, and running in general, I didn’t understand the importance of tapering or of taking cut-back weeks periodically. I thought in order to become a better, faster, stronger, leaner runner, I had to go balls-to-the-wall effort 24/7/365. Not so. Experience has since taught me that taking appropriate time off, or just even appropriate recovery time, is as essential a part of the training as the actual running. In fact, some may even argue that recovery and cut-back is even MORE important than the actual running, itself, to allow the body to properly rest and rejuvenate and torn/strained muscles, to repair.
This week, and subsequent weeks, will be substantial build-up weeks. We’re slated for ~8 miles of speed on Wednesday followed by a good 17 miles of hills in Barrington on Saturday. It will be great — and especially now that I’ve just submitted a final paper and am beginning to see the light on this thesis project… the timing could not have been better.