Tell me why I can't go faster (Page 2)

 It's a tough question and so therefore it depends you should tell what your goals are first to see if their realistic. You may have set the bar too high already and risk injury. Like many have said base training should come first before speed work .....even racing.  

Mr. Bear, you know I respect the hell out of you.....and you're right, training pace is not the focus. I am just happy with my pace improving. I still have about 3 months left of training with this group and I expect my pace to improve with each month we train regardless.

And yes, I do learn from everything I read here, veteran, experienced or newbies.

That's exactly how my plan develops. I start in about one month. I'm giving my self 5 months to train for a half marathon - in addition to the one month I will use just getting back to my normal 3 day 2x per week run.

I don't think I've set the bar too high?? I think I'm being real conservative.

My curiousity comes when the season starts back up in May. Do I continue to try to run 15-20miles per week or what? That's where no one has quite answered the question for me yet.

Really? I've been training more or less that way (running) for 25 years (build slowly, allow your body to recover, train mostly slower than you plan to race), and apart from the past few years (which involved several knee surgeries) I have improved quite a bit over those 25 years (and I'm starting to improve again, training in that way, though now including swimming and biking).

You can still be 'aggressive' in your training -- work hard, don't skip workouts, eat right, etc.

You can be a part of this world without hurting yourself. You just need to learn the difference between 'I want to stop because I'm tired' and 'I need to stop because I'm injuring myself'.

No, you should not be exhausted after every workout, if by exhausted you mean that you feel like you couldn't have gone any harder or further or longer during that workout. Very few workouts should have this effect on you.  If all of your workouts are like that, you will very soon be unable to train at the intensities, volume, or time that you need to maximize adaptations.

As for learning the distinction that I mentioned above, listen carefully to your body. That niggling pain in your heel that you felt during miles 12-14 -- did it get worse during that time? Did it go away over night, or get worse? Did it come back immediately at the start of the next training session? Depending on the answers, you could be headed for achilles tendon problems, and that sucks. But you can catch these things before they get out of hand, if you listen carefully to your body. Notice where it hurts, when the pain comes, and whether it sticks around. You WILL have some aches and pains while training. If they persist, or affect your form, or get worse, or crop up while your not training -- then start asking yourself whether you're going too hard.

This thread was started by a person wanting to know why speed was not improving. The basic answer is not enough base. My recommendation of running 2-3 miles daily and building to 6-7 miles daily was primarily to build base. IMO doing daily running at an easy pace allows the body to slowly adapt and 6 miles/day is less stressful than 10 miles in 4 days per week of running. They both come out to around 40 miles, but the daily running is easier on the body. The runs should be done EASY, making it possible to run every day. If you're to wiped out to run every day, then either you're running too hard or too far - or both. I've tried to reiterate that it takes time to build the base. For some it could be a couple months, for others it could take a year or more. My recommendation started at 2-3 miles/day, but if that is not where you're at then try 1-2 per day and build from there.

One of the side benefits to my running so much was that over the course of 7 months I lost over 20 pounds without altering my diet at all. If weight loss had been a goal it may have been even greater by adjusting my diet and adding in other forms of exercise.

I was thinking about the mental aspects while I was out running today. One of the things I did in my training races was to start at or near the back of the pack. This meant I didn't have the negative impact of all the speedy people blowing by and it allowed me to pass people. I would generally be passing people in the first mile or so then settle in with people running about my speed. At that point I liked to pick someone out that was maybe 50 yards ahead and just work on catching them. If I did, then I would choose another person to chase down and so on. A few times I never did catch the person I was chasing, but the focus of trying pulled me through a race at a much faster pace. I got the positive mental aspects of passing some people, then having a faster time by chasing the slightly faster people. That helped build confidence and some mental toughness.

As for not liking to run - doing something you don't like is often a recipe for not improving. I can tell you without me having a goal for what I was doing there was no way I would have been out running as much as I did. I certainly didn't enjoy running in the often very nasty weather during the winter.

No, you don't need to keep running every day once you have built the base and maintained it for several months. At that point you can add speedwork and long runs, etc., which may necessitate taking days off for recovery.

I do understand that running when you're significantly overweight is very difficult. I once weighed almost 60 pounds more than I do now. While I was in my weight loss phase 8 years ago my primary exercise was biking, mostly because it can be done without all the impact of running and it can burn almost as many calories provided you pedal all the time and do not coast. Similar to running every day, I biked every day - 10-15 miles during the week and 20-40 miles on the weekends for a total of about 120-150 miles/week, sometimes up to 200. Over the course of 6 months doing this I lost 50 pounds. It was only after the weight loss that I ever even started running and that was to maintain the weight loss I had worked hard to achieve. If running is overly difficult for you now, you may want to consider waiting until you've lost more weight.