For the last seven weeks or so, my Strava has been blank. I’ve still been running, but all the activities are set to private. I’m trying to run truly easy, and to subvert my ego, I’m making sure that nobody can see it.

It’s stupid that I feel the need to make all of my activities private – no one thinks better or worse of me because of the paces I’m running. But I know I’ll push the pace from actually easy to easy-ish if it means the difference between a 9:XX average and a 10:XX average (or as it’s been looking like lately, a 10:XX average and an 11:00 average). And right now, I need to reconnect with what’s truly easy. I’d been doing easy runs that were riding the line between the upper HR bound of easy and dipping into that Pfitzinger Endurance HR zone. I don’t think it was giving me much in the way of aerobic gains, which is truly what I’m after in this extended base building period I’m doing right now.

I lost a lot of conditioning between the two down months before the DRC Half and then the two weeks I took off completely after that race. I feel like this is an opportunity to reassess my training and change some of the things I did wrong last cycle. One of those things was running my easy miles too quickly, and that’s the easiest thing to fix. So I’m slowing down and going away from the social aspect of Strava. I plan to end up with about 15 full weeks of rebuilding my mileage and running 98% of it easy. I didn’t even add in strides until this week, but now I plan to add those in to two or three runs a week, and maybe at the end of the month I’ll run some cruise intervals. Probably just a 3x3min to start but maybe working up to more after that.

In early March, I plan to take this base period into a Daniels 5k cycle that culminates in the DRC Independence Day 5k. Not ideal conditions in Texas in July, but I really want to take a cue from Lydiard and extend this base period for as long as I can tolerate. I’m at the tail end of a Super Week right now (which doesn’t feel very super given that this mileage would have been incredibly low for me five months ago) an am shooting for a 35 mile week, but next week I’ll drop back closer to 30 and keep building to 40 or 45, just depending on how everything goes.

When I hit the end of the base phase, I’ll run another 5k and see what my VDOT looks like and set my goal then. But the goal for the year is a sub-21 5k, which is actually probably more reasonable than last year’s sub-20 5k goal. If I can knock that out in July, that’d be a huge achievement, but I’ll find out if that’s feasible in another eight weeks.

It’s been very humbling realizing my true easy pace. But hopefully in eight weeks, I’ll be a tad faster. Gotta trust the process and all that.