“Make the hard days hard and the easy days easy.”  This is pretty standard running advice that basically means you should avoid doing strength training on rest days so that you can get a full rest to recover your best.  The only problem with this advice is that it’s hard to go hard twice in one day!  If I do a tough Muscle Pump class in the morning, there’s no way that I can run hard at track the same evening.  I would love it if the schedules were reversed and I could go to morning track and then take a strength class in the afternoon or evening, but my gym doesn’t offer evening strength classes and to be honest, I don’t know if I’d have the motivation at the end of the day.  I certainly won’t do it on my own.

So what I’ve been doing is the Monday morning Muscle Pump before an easy run and then going to evening track on Tuesday.  I figured that more than 24 hours’ space between workouts would be sufficient, right?  Well, more often than not, I’d still feel sore during the warm up Tuesday night.  I’d get through the speed sessions, but it was a struggle.  But they are supposed to be hard, right?  Yes, but I wasn’t fully making the connection that my strength sessions were hurting my ability to do the speed sessions as well as I could.  But I didn’t want to give up the Monday class either.

Then last week a builder friend of mine told me he’d ordered too much sod for a new house and I could have it if I liked.  I had wanted to make some nice grass pathways between my garden beds for a while and I couldn’t pass up FREE, so with my husband’s help, we loaded up about a pallet of sod.  I figured loading and laying two truckfuls of sod was plenty of strength work for the day, so I skipped my class.

And then at track the next night, I felt like I was flying.  Sure, it was still a tough workout, but I did not have the dead legs and soreness that I usually have.  My last 1000 was 18 seconds faster than my first!

It sounds so obvious that I’d been going too hard in class, but it took skipping it for me to realize it.  Now that marathon training is on, I have to prioritize my key running sessions instead of my favorite gym class.

So I missed my Monday class yesterday and  just ran easy.  This morning, I went to the beginner strength class, which is easier and shorter and dropped my weights down by about half.  I know I still need to keep strength in the schedule, but going all-out every week is not helping me with my goal right now.

I’m hoping I made the right choice because tonight is the Newton, the timed 20x200m workout with decreasing rest that we did at the beginning of the summer.  Hopefully, I’ll see some improvement, but you never know.  No matter what happens tonight as far as pace, I want to see if the timing and lower effort of the strength class makes a difference.

If I still struggle tonight, I’ll see what I can do about finding another class that gets the job done without leaving me sore before key workouts.  It’s awesome to be strong, but I need to remember I’m not training to be a bodybuilder, but a better, faster runner.