FWIW

"How should I train for the 24-Hour Run?" wondered Dan DeRosha.

There's something about the phrase, "For What It's Worth", that I really like. It's a shorthand way of saying, "You may want to disregard everything I'm about to say, but in the event that you do still want to listen, here it is..." Or, "I may not be the best authority to give the following advice, here it is..." And so on... In this case, I certainly did qualify my response. Of course that qualification included the fact that my previous experience with 24-Hour runs has been to a) run one with really lousy results, and b) be the race director of one that I didn't run at all. With those caveats, I gave the following advice: "Run a lot."

Back in the seventies, when running was at best a fringe activity, and running marathons was truly "out there", a friend and I trained for and ran the first Cleveland Marathon. As someone queried, "Wow, a marathon! How did you train for it?", my training partner, who did not want to waste the effort of explaining his training regimen to someone who wouldn't understand, or really care anyway, answered, "I ran a lot". Now it was definitely not my intention to brush Dan off with such an attitude. In fact, I was quite serious: to train to run a lot, you ought to... run a lot.

And over this past weekend, run a lot we did. On Saturday we hit the towpath along with Dave. I did 14, while Dan went on to do several more. These miles were at a really good pace; well under 8 mpm for the last few.

Sunday Dan and I got together again, this time at Hinckley. It was cold and dark at 5am, but that was to be expected. We did seven (I think) 3+ mile loops around the lake. Some were on the all-purpose trail, and some on the dirt lake trail. I even did a couple more - enough to call it 30 miles in all.

Today I did 10 more miles. Although these were slow, I'm very happy that I could run at all, given the past weekend.

So yes, FWIW, I've been running a lot.