Pounding Out the Miles

Well I’ve put together a final running program to prepare for Reunion.  Sprints and form runs (where you run hard for an extended period of time) are back in the mix, as well as running with weights in hopes of increasing my ability to scale mountains.  Hopefully the variations on a running theme will also help overcome the fatigue which has been plaguing me lately.

Running with weights is a brave new world, so my attempt to quantify this has led to the creation of a “pound-miles” statistic…basically the total weight I’ve burdened myself with, multiplied by the number of miles I’ve lugged it around.  I would hazard that this has already been thought of before or is an entirely useless concept, so I won’t credit myself with any originality.  We’ll see how it goes, though – the hope being that it yields a basis for measuring progress and understanding what size payloads stress my body out.

I can tell you that racking up pound-miles wears you down.  Set out Wednesday morning at 5:30AM for ten miles and only strapped on the pair of three-pound hand weights to burden myself with an extra six pounds.  Well, about mile six I really started feeling tired and opted to shave a mile off the run – so 6 pounds * 9 miles made this a 54 pound-mile trot.  Even though last Sunday’s run was much shorter, hauling 24 pounds around made that effort equal 96 pound-miles.  Enthused to see how this science experiment turns out!