Saturday 0 miles.

Ben got to see 3 new born (by minutes) baby goats today. He laughed and pointed. Then while playing with another few days old baby... the mother goat came over and bit Ben's ear. His first animal attack. Ben whimpered for a few seconds then it was business as usual. Ben has eaten roasted goat. Is that Irony?

I sat down with Lis today to discuss her training for this next season. We mainly talked about the mistakes we made last go around and tried to formulate a path that would see her regain the fitness and strength with out the risk. I am using heavy doses of mental re-trainig with Lis and we are also going to be focusing on her Vo2 max very early in her training.
To start with- Lis has zero weekly mileage planned. The only focus will be on her long run and her hard track day. Rather than determine a week a 'success' based on her mileage, we will be trying only to be successful at those 2 days. All other run days will be run only by feel and she will stop when she feels it's time to stop. There should be only one purpose to the easy days and that is to not build fatigue.
As the weeks and her fitness progress then so will the volume. All the while the main focus will still be on the long run, the hard track session, and not building fatigue on easy days. In time she will be running her easy days longer and longer yet the effort will remain the same.
The other aspect of the schedule that will be of importance will be a test session every 3 weeks. I thought this format up a while ago and it has two distinct functions. Both as a test and as a workout. Lis has a marathon goal pace of 9:00 (which she will be able to run in ~25-30 weeks). So her first test is going to be a 2 mile time trial at 9:00 pace and she will get her average HR. We have a fairly accurate idea as to what HR Lis can hold for the marathon. It's 150. So once her average HR for the test hits 150, then we will add 1 mile to the test. Then when she can run 3 miles at HR 150... we add another mile... and so on. One interesting aspect of this test/ workout is that 9:00 pace is her 10k pace right now because she has just restarted serious training again after a long recovery break. So the first few tests will be run at her 10k pace. Because the test will be 18:00 long- this is going to be a tempo run and a solid workout. As she progresses in fitness, the pace will move towards her 15k race pace but it will be longer. Then it will get to her 1/2 marathon race pace, then her 30k race pace and so on.. All the while the distance will steadily increase until eventually I can see her doing tests of 12-13 miles at 9:00 pace. This is an intuitive progression format to me and I will be using something similar for my next go around.

I'm about 60% sure that I am going to take my end of the season break now and get my legs healthy and give my endocrine system a rest. My loose plan right now is to focus on 10k and half marathon for the Spring.. then do a fall marathon.