The Return of the MWMLR!

[Note: For those of you who don't care about training principles and just want to hear about why my run was awesome, skip the first three paragraphs]

If any of you read the title to today's post and are scratching your head, it may be because you're not familiar with marathon training guru Pete Pfitzinger. He literally wrote the book on marathon training, okay, he wrote a book on marathon training, Advanced Marathoning.

While I'm not using his plan this training cycle, I have taken elements of it and incorporated them into the plan my team is using. One big part of Pfitz' weekly schedule is a mid-week medium long run (I'm just abbreviating it as MWMLR to save some keystrokes). I found this to be a particularly beneficial component.

Marathon runners often obsess over the importance the weekend long run. There's evidence that a single weekly long run might not be enough to bring your aerobic capacity to a new level, but in my opinion, the true benefit of the mid-week long run is psychological. If you run 12 to 15 miles in the middle of the week, that weekend long run doesn't seem so intimidating, and if that weekend 22 miler doesn't seem so bad, then it follows that maybe even 26.2 miles sounds a little more doable.

Photo from Flickr use: Norikuroda

Anyway, that was plenty of introduction to bring me to the part where I say that I finally got in a true MWMLR this week after a long time off. While I've been doing mid-week runs of 9 to 10 miles, there's today was the first time in at least 6 weeks.

I did my favorite standby route: over the 59th Street Bridge into Queens, along Vernon Blvd, over the Pulaski Bridge into Brooklyn, along the Greenpoint and Williamsburg water fronts, around the Navy Yard, and over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Park.

Today's iteration was particularly awesome because it was extremely foggy this morning. Running through Central Park to get to the Queensboro, I couldn't see or even really hear any cars. It truly did not feel like I was running in the middle of the city. Then, going running into Queens, I could see the lights of some of the taller buildings cutting through the fog, but since it was still dark, I couldn't make out the buildings themselves. It was as though the lights were simply suspended in the clouds.

By the time I arrived in Downtown Brooklyn it was light out, but the fog was just as thick. Running under the Manhattan Bridge (so I guess that means I was in DUMBO) I couldn't see the top of its towers. The Brooklyn Bridge looked ethereal, quite a feat for such an imposing masonry structure. I didn't get to see the sunrise, which is usually my favorite part of an early morning run, but I experienced the city in a new light--a wonderful start to the day.