As I alluded to in my last post, I am having a hard time with LHR training. To the point where I don’t want to run. And if I’m not running, I’m not improving. There’s no point.

I’m going back to running normally. For now.

Maybe I can revisit it in the future. It seems like it might be a good choice if I were actually planning to run a marathon. Or if I were coming back from injury. Or just had plateaued in my improvements from other training. But none of that is true. I got a 2 minute 5k PR the day before I started this nonsense. I’m definitely not plateauing. And why fix what isn’t broke?

I don’t want to dread running. I want it to be fun (or as fun as running gets). I don’t want to spend 5-6 hours a week doing hardly any mileage. I’m just miserable doing this.

My take-away from this experiment is to slow down my easy runs even more. Run/walk intervals are okay for them, but if I want to run them straight, I need to stick to around 12:30-13 min/mi pace. (I have a tendency to speed up to half marathon pace.) I’m also going to start monitoring my heart rate during more of my runs. I would love to see what I’m doing normally. I don’t even know what my max heart rate is.

Maffetone Method, I don’t doubt that you are useful…to some people. I am just not one of them right now. I know that I didn’t stick with it long enough to even attempt to see an improvement. I just don’t think there would be any if I was hating doing it so much.