Sunday I planned to get up early to get in a long run. But Saturday night I decided, “I don’t have to get up EARLY to run. That’s the beauty of this time of year. In the summer I HAVE TO get up early due to the heat. But right now, I can get some rest…” So I set my alarm for 6:45 AM to sleep in and then still get out for a run.

Well, 6:45 the alarm went off and I turned it off and fell back to sleep until 7:30. Now for me, this is sleeping in A LOT. I feel like I’ve wasted half the day if I wake up after 7:00. (This is a common element to the soundtrack of my mind… something I need to work on changing, but that’s not what this post is about!) So I woke up at 7:30, went downstairs, took JadeTheBoxer into the yard, got both of us some breakfast and then I cracked open a book.

At about 8:00 I started feeling down on myself, like I’m just screwing everything up with my training. By 8:30 I was really mad at myself, calling myself lazy. Somehow I managed to stop myself and say, “Hey… this is waking up early for some people. You’ve still got plenty of time to go. In fact, you could probably go run pretty soon. You’ll have digested your breakfast enough by about 9:00 to head out.”

So I got dressed to run.  Since I was already feeling somewhat negative, I didn’t want my Garmin to taunt me.  So I just set the display to show me the time of day and the duration of my run.  The day was gray and windy and chilly, but the second I stepped out the door I was already happier.

When I finished, based on the time I’d been running I assumed I’d have about 9.5 miles, but when I checked it out I was surprised to see I’d covered 10.25 miles.  Granted, I’d blown past my “prescribed long run training pace” on this, but I felt good.  That was a pleasant surprise.  I even chose to walk up a couple steep hills and a couple times to eat something.

Sooooo….. with how sporadic my training has been the past month and how my physical well-being seems to be all over the place, I decided I need to switch up how I do my long runs for the next month. I’m going to revert back to how I started running: the Galloway method.

My intervals are going to be 14 minutes of running with 1 minute of walking.  Not only will this work muscles differently, but it will also serve as a good reminder for me to take a drink or eat something to keep my energy up.  Sometimes I get in a zone and forget to do those things and don’t remember until I’m a little too far gone.

I’ll use my trusty Gymboss to time my intervals. (Read my review of the Gymboss)

So this will be a new approach to my training, but it’s also an old approach.  One that has served me well before and one that has served countless others well before.  I’m looking forward to the experiment and seeing how I feel using this as a more experienced runner as opposed to a beginning runner.