It’s a good thing, supposedly. At least in this case. But I’m feeling it today!

The idea is to train your body for endurance without doing outrageously long or difficult workouts, but by simply doing them frequently enough that your body doesn’t recover completely in between. By pushing your body to do more work before it is thoroughly recovered, you are encouraging it to adapt to these new, tougher conditions.

In preparing for a marathon I need structure. This time I’m basing my structure on Hansons Marathon Method, from the book of the same name. I’m now 5 out of 18 weeks through the program. The first 5 weeks are about building a base and acclimatizing to daily running. The next phase adds speed intervals and tempo runs, as well as longer easy runs. The third phase changes speed workouts for strength-based runs, and the final 10 days are of course a taper to the race.

Having finished the first phase the meat of the program hasn’t really begun. I’m doing pretty well; I find the easy runs easy and I am not experiencing any over-use symptoms from running every day. But because I’m combining the six prescribed runs a week with three bike rides a week on my trainer, I’m starting to experience the fatigue.

There’s no doubt I’m going to have to give up the bike rides soon. The alternative would be to use them as substitutes for runs rather than additional workouts, but except for the fact that I can watch Homeland episodes on the trainer, I prefer running.

So far, haha.