happy beginnings?

The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare.
For anyone to believe any extended endeavor ~ physical or mental ~ is achieved without some degree of preparation is fool-hardy. The more preparation, usually the more successful and enjoyable the result.
With 2 months before Northern Nipmuck, the serious preparation has begun: looking at footwear choices for the season, clothing, food, fluid, gear,
And getting in a foundation.
Although weekends are almost tailor-made for a once-weekly LSD event, the other training only seems plausible for me at a time I despise ~ mornings before work.
Ugh.
This means getting up earlier, departing for work earlier, starting to hurt earlier and taunting my office-mates with my serious stinky funk before I can take a shower at some point around 11am.
And this isn’t just getting a lightweight s&g jog in.
As I mentioned earlier, this year, I advise doing something a bit different based upon some of the data from the NSCA course I attended in June: the extensive utilization of controlled recovery / HEP-based bursts as a means to improve speed, power output and also aerobic threshold (yes, *aerobic*).
What this means is once warmed up (after 6-10 minutes of a sub maximal jog), head into a series of near maximal 20-30 second sprints with a controlled recovery ratio initially 3:1 and tapering down to 2:1.
For now (8 weeks out), that means thrice-weekly morning workouts with 10 minutes of jogging, then 15 near-max sprints for 25-30 seconds with a 50-65 second recovery jog between.
Before work and whatever fitness classes / hockey etc. after work.
This is *not* easy stuff. But it seems to be really working and quite an efficient manner for development.
We'll find out how efficient in less than 2 months.