Light lifting

Light lifting with rubber bands.  Focused on explosive seated calf raises(Soleus), pawbacks(Hamstrings), Hip flexion(knee drive), toe raises(Shins), heel walks(shins).

Soleus is the calf muscle you use when running.  Pawbacks are my favorite and teach you to return leg quickly back to the ground and strengthen hamstring at the upper attachment.  Knee drive helps get your legs up, but don't bring your knee all the way up.  If you're gonna work calves, shins need work, and is actually a really important muscle when you run.

Legs already got a pretty good strength workout with the workout on soft grass tonight.  Not a super long workout, but legs were pretty tired afterwards.

Goal of all this is to slowly bring up strength, force, power.  I'm hovering around 152 pounds, so shed off a another 5 or so while bringing up these things and that means speed and endurance improve too.

Essentially the same things I did in 2009-2010.  This time I'll be adding some other things besides plyometrics like complex training and ballistic training which will only help.  Trick is going to figuring out how much rest I need between hard running sessions with all this stuff thrown in.  I'm going to do things sparingly the next couple of weeks with Masters champs coming up, but then I'll have a couple weeks to figure things out before I need to settle into a plan for Midwinter.

Really helped though.  I did a workout with Gomez in January 2010 where we did a bunch of 2 mile repeats, 3 or 4 I forget in around 10:10-10:20, then we did some 200's and I was amazed how fast I could run from the plyometrics I'd been doing.

Other things I need to sneak is occasionally will be deep water running which always makes my legs strong and makes my form good.  And some snowshoe running.  In 2010 January, I had a hard 20 miler planned.  well it snowed 14 inches and I ended up running from about 14 miles on Snowshoes up and down Cadillac in deep snow.  I froze coming down into the north wind after getting hot going up.  It was a brutal run, but a couple of snowshoe runs always make land running feel easier.

This Thursday I'm thinking about the Zap Fitness Bookend workout.
2-k at 10-k pace
6x1-k at 5-k pace
2-k at 10-k pace
Some 200's at end to get legs turning over.  Want to see if I can break 30 seconds.  Hard to imagine I've run 24.1 in a 200 meter race with no blocks.
400 easy between everything.

Thinking about going to track for first time for this to really see where I'm at.

So USATF has something called the Phidippides award.  It's a masters award, and you earn points by running on certified courses.  The longer the race the more points you earn.  Going for the gold.

Castille who won US masters x-c champs last year just ran 29:52 for new age group record for 10-k.  If he shows up to x-c nationals he'll be by himself.  He's 46 years old.