Adding More Structure to Your Body

You can run the same distance at the same pace every day for the rest of your life, and I’ll gladly call you a fellow runner. Certainly no one has ever been barred from entering a race because they hadn’t done hard workouts on the track for the last several weeks. But if you want to run faster in races and your running is at the moderate, steady pace that I’ve been urging, you need to make a few changes in your training. You’ll race better if once a week you include a few miles of running at race pace or faster. You’ll have more strength for these fast workouts if you boost your endurance by occasionally running longer than usual.
A lot of runners avoid doing this type of training because they don’t like the idea of planning their running so meticulously. They just want to get out the door and run how they feel on a given day. They think that adding more structure to their running will make it less interesting. Actually, the opposite is true. Variety is the spice of running as well as life. When you add different types of workouts to your running, then you’ve gone a long way toward finding a way to keep yourself motivated from day to day. Each run seems to have more of a purpose. If I’ve done a fast workout on the track on a Wednesday, then I look forward to running slowly on the roads on Thursday to recover. By the weekend, I’m looking forward to joining some friends for my longest run on the week, which I’ll look forward to following the next day with a short, slow run by myself, which will get me fired up for that track workout on Wednesday, and so on. I think all runners, even those who aren’t going to race, should at least dabble in the different types of workouts covered in this chapter. Including runs that are faster or longer than usual is just part of training more completely, like stretching and strengthening exercises are.