Last week was my first week at 28 miles and it went pretty well. There were a couple of days with a very small amount of soreness in my knees, but nothing that didn’t work itself out after a few miles. I’ve now made it through a few days of 2 runs. This is a result of late afternoon runs with my 11 year old daughter who is building a base for her first cross country season.
I’ll be upping my “easy” pace from 9:37/mi to 9:27/mi this week. That marks a change from a VDOT of 43 to a VDOT of 44. VDOT is basically a measure of one’s running ability based on a recent race time. I got the concept from Daniels’ Running Formula, a great book by Jack Daniels (the running coach, not the whiskey distiller). I highly recommend it. Anyway, the change in VDOT level is largely ceremonial since I’ve been (unintentionally) running a lot of my easy runs slightly faster than 9:27/mi anyway. For now, the tempo, interval, marathon and repeat paces don’t really come into play since I’m in a base building phase. My 24 week half marathon program (for the Walt Disney World Half) doesn’t start until the end of this month, so it’s pretty much all easy runs for a few more weeks.
So, it’s been a month and a half already, have you stopped running?