As long as I have hot tea, I love ice baths, really, I am not kidding. But then I started thinking about blood carrying nutrients that help with the healing process of inflamed areas. If blood vessels constrict, healing would be slowed down, right? What am I not understanding here?
I truly dislike gels, energy drinks and such.
I used them in the past. My stomach tolerates them well but most are laden with artificial ingredients. Do any of you know of 100% natural products for refueling? Carrying salted potatoes would probably not be practical for a marathoner but is there anything else I could consider?
On the days when I cannot find the time to do one longer session of strength training, I break it up into mini sessions.
What is the benefit of doing, say, sets of deadlifts a minute appart vs two hours apart?
Second run a day, beneficial, useless or harmful?
Sometimes I don't have one block of time to do a longer run but I can run twice during one day but for shorter distances. Am I delaying/wrecking recovery after the first run? OR Am I strengthening my legs?
Exercising fast twitch muscles.
I am a firm believer in slow, controlled strength exercises but I keep wondering how I can safely exercise my fast twitch muscles. My legs get the exercise when I run but what about other parts of the body?
Very high intensity intervals.
There has been some research that showed that short but very intense periods of exercise produce same changes in muscles as long endurance runs. So while I would be very concerned about injuries I am still curious if any of you has tried that and seen positive results in running.
Why limit the longest run in marathon training to 20-22 miles?
The conventional wisdom is that it is to prevent injury but ultramarathoners run longer distances in their training and most survive without injuring themselves. Wouldn't it be better to actually run even more than 26mi so when the race day comes the marathon distance does not seem too daunting? Just a thought.
Combining hard running days with hard lifting days.
It seems to make sense to me that on easier days my entire body gets to rest, that all of my body's resources are used for recovery. If that's the case, on heavy days I need to do both, heavy duty running and lifting. Yes?
Am I overanalyzing my training yet again? (I would like this to remain a rhetorical question. :-) )
Word verification.
Why, oh, why some of you, my bloggy friends, are still using word verification? I wonder how many of my comments got lost, especially on those posts where the word verification box appears AFTER I click the submit button as I tend to close the window right after I am done with my reply.
On a different note, my CIM training is going surprisingly well even though I was quite a bit sick this week. I am much slower than I used to be before I started backpacking training for my summer trek but it seems I am able to put in more miles than I hoped I would:
week 1: 19.8mi
week 2: 39.8mi (OK, big jump in miles but it felt good!)
week 3: 44.3mi
And now even better news. A while ago I posted about closing of many CA state parks.
I was very happy to hear that thanks to private donations my favorite state park escaped the chopping block at least for the next three years. For a while it did not look it was going to work, but in the end we won! YES!
