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Dopey Challenge Training - Week Nine

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“Training is doing your homework. It’s not exciting. More often than not it’s tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.”
-Jeff Edmonds

Well, it’s been yet another crazy week in the life of the RunningFool. Long days that started in the wee hours of the morning (seriously – 6:00 a.m. phone conference calls every single morning) and ran well into the evening. The knee is slowly healing but it still being a pain (in more ways than one). Thursday night Thomas and I had way too much fun handing out candy on Halloween to 127 trick-or-treaters who stopped by the house (see photo below of just some of our decorations including an inflatable 7' Tigger vampire!).

Tigger v1.jpg
Photo by Thomas Skripek

And then there was the weekend visit to CA to take in the D23 tour of Walt Disney Studios and the Disney Archives (and hit my 1M flight miles on Alaska Airlines!). Did I make my Dopey Challenge training goals for week eight? Nope. Nada. Not even close. How am I going to deal with missing my training targets? It's not so much what I do, it's what I don't do that will keep me moving forward in the training program. What I don't do is pile on the 'missing' miles.

I’m sure many of you have had that moment where you knew that even given your best intentions, training was just not going to happen according to plan. Or may simply be a mix-up of your calendar weeks (which given this is an eighteen-week program is very, very easy to do). What you shouldn’t do is assume that adding in missed miles to the following week is the smart thing – a ‘catch-up’ of sorts. Quite honestly, that is one of the worst things you can do.

According to Competitor.com, squeezing in extra workouts and /or adding extra miles to your plan to make up for lost time is one of the quickest ways to earn yourself an over-training injury. Too many workouts or too long of runs will cut into recovery time. Shortened recovery time means your muscles haven’t yet forgiven you for the last workout you put them through and are more easily injured or strained. And then the cycle starts of missing more workouts to deal with injuries or just plain old fatigue.

So, while it was not the best of training weeks, it was only a few missed days. My overall fitness didn’t suffer too terribly much except for effects of the fun-sized Almond Joy’s that never quite made it out to the trick-or-treaters. I don’t need to start the training program back at the beginning but I also don’t need to add any ‘make-up’ miles to the already busy training plan. And if I needed more incentive to get moving in week nine, it’s the Wine & Dine Half Marathon weekend which means it’s time to hit the roads again in Walt Disney World! If you are following along with the Higdon training plan, you’ll see that I’ve switched out Saturday and Sunday to accommodate for Mickey’s Jingle Jungle 5k and the Wine & Dine Half Marathon both of which happen on Saturday.

Don’t forget to check out the Team MousePlanet Discussion Board for all the latest Wine & Dine Half Marathon weekend updates including a potential Team MousePlanet meet-up prior to the half marathon!

Here’s to continuing the journey to Dopey and to a successful training week. Safe travels to those heading to WDW and happy running! See you there!

Training Week Nine

Monday November 4th – rest / Barre3

Tuesday November 5th – 4 miles / Upper-body strength training

Wednesday November 6th – 7 miles

Thursday November 7th – rest

Friday November 8th – 2 miles

Saturday November 9th – 7 miles (plan) – 16.2 miles (actual)

Sunday November 10th – 17 miles (plan) – 7 miles (actual)

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Updated 11-03-2013 at 06:55 PM by RunningFool

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Team MousePlanet , Featured

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