Running, Chaos, and No Time

    So much to do, so little time. The old adage rings true, and seems more apropos with each ensuing week. Last week I had the excuse of recovery from 6 miles and 20 obstacles to pare my workout schedule down to three days. This week I have no such excuse, except for a serious lack of time to get shit done. I am heading out of town for the coming weekend, leaving friday, and prepping to go is adding to an already packed schedule. So I am going to have to shoe-horn my workouts in as best I can. Tonight I will run, whether outside in the rain or on the treadmill, I will run. I have gear in the car if I find myself with the opportunity to run outside between work and darkness. I would love to get in a real Fartlek, aka Speedplay, run in the good old out-of-doors. Maybe find some hills to combine Fartlek and hills to really grind in an intense run in a short period. This is my plan: shorter, intense runs instead of long, slow, tedious, knee beating, distance runs. I have to take my knees into consideration as I train for longer, faster runs. I have been doing my homework and the new line of thinking is to focus on "quality miles" versus "junk miles." In other words, to build a solid base run smarter and harder, instead of just pounding the pavement for endless miles and beating holy hell out of delicate body parts. What seems like an eternity ago, though in reality only 3 months ago, my physical therapist told me that if I wanted to take up running I should focus on cross training for endurance and stamina, and limit my races to 5K, and never run more than twice a week. Well, as you might imagine, I am bending the rules just a bit. But I am being cautious, sort of. I have found that I am beginning to love running. Not necessarily the tedium of training, but most definitely the races. I am wishing I had the time and finances to run several events per month, focusing on trail runs. I love Trail Runs. I plan on finding myself a few decent trails to run on my own, pretend it is race day, set my stop watch and go. Silver Falls has fantastic trails, but it is a higher elevation so will be cold and frosty as winter progresses. I am going to look around for some good paths, maybe even revisiting my old haunt; Molalla River State Park. The downside there is that they close the gate at dark, which when trail running, is probably for the best. It is not a real hilly path, but it is scenic and practically on my way home from work. Hmmm. I may have to start hitting it at least on fridays when I am off work early. Damn, I'm glad I thought of it.
    Back to the chaos of my week, and having to force my workouts into time slots. If I am lucky I will run tonight and swim my usual tuesday and thursday. I will add in strength training after run and swim to ramp it up a notch. Wednesday is drill night at the Fire Station, but I plan on getting in my Down and Dirty Thirty leg workout and some ab work before I get to go play with the fire engines. I am not even going to plan anything for the weekend, since it is a whole weekend of family time for my little brother's wedding. Okay, I will throw in my Merrills and my cold weather running gear, just in case, but I am not counting on getting in a workout. But then again....