Day 6: Mark Allen Still Haunts My Daydreams

Many, many years ago I wrote a post about how Mark Allen haunts my dreams. Well, as I ran the day's 30K, I began listening to Matt Fitzgerald's "Iron War." I've seen the entire footage from that 1989 Ironman, heard interviews with both Mark Allen and Dave Scott about the race countless times, and I think the story's been told to death, but I love Matt Fitzgerald and will faithfully read everything he will ever write. So there I was, listening to the tale of the Iron War for the bajillionth time as I ran the last 8.6 miles of the day's 18.6 miles.

I had already run 7 miles on the treadmill that morning, and done a lazy 9 miles on the bike to make up for 3 miles that I thought it would be unwise to run before I hit the Los Troncos trail. I ran the trail not feeling particularly strong, but also not feeling weak either. I just didn't feel like I had the turbo boosters on today. But I had still comfortably averaged 7mph in my earlier run, something that had been a challenge even a couple of weeks ago. And I finished the 8.5 mile hilly Los Troncos trail in only 4 minutes slower than my best time for the trail.

As I got in the car, I was still listening to Matt Fitzgerald talk about Mark Allen and how he used what I have disparagingly called the "zone 1" method of training in the past. In essence "Zone 1" training is where you determine a heart rate below threshold, and spend nearly all of your training time there. The idea is that you wind up getting really fast while not going very hard, but it always seemed like a load of bullshit for lazy people to me. But then Mark Allen crashed my daydreams again, and I realized that, isn't that exactly what I'm doing right now? I'm running only as fast as is comfortable so as not to poop myself out too much. When an effort requires me to dig or push in order to keep running, I just walk. And against all odds, I appear to be getting faster.

More evidence is needed, of course. But if I wind up a faster runner at the end of this gluttony of overtraining, then I think that we will all have to eat our hats in one way or another; me because the Zone 1 method of training seems to have something to it, and you because you thought that I would just get fat and slow and injured. For my own sake, I hope we're both wrong.