Jeff Galloway

I spent a little too much time cleaning house today, so I didn't have time for both my swim and running with Jeff Galloway.  I did get the swim workout in, though, and was at least able to hear Jeff give his talk at Fleet Feet tonight.

My workout:
Warm-up
1 x 400     Free loosen
12 x 25     Free, work dist/stroke

Main set
10 x 75     1-5 build x 25; 6, 8, 10 fast; 7, 9 slow
1 x 400     Pull
Repeat

Warm-down
1 x 200     Easy

Total: 3200 m (2 mi) in 1:20

Lessons from Jeff Galloway's talk tonight:

• He's against puking.  And dying.  He knows that one's a losing battle, but he's still against it.
• Many people actually improve their marathon times by adding walk breaks in.  Many also improve their times by taking more frequent walk breaks.
• You really only have to run three times a week.  The long runs are most important; the other two can be only 30-60 minutes.
• Endurance athletes really don't need a lot of muscle, and most never spend much time at all in the gym lifting weights.
• If you're starting to feel pain somewhere, there's a good chance it's primarily due to your reflex brain restricting blood flow to the area because of added stress.  By acknowledging this, you can talk to the area in pain and use your conscious brain to tell you body to send more blood there, and the pain will likely decrease or go away.  (Or something like that...)
• There is no proof that stretching helps prevent injury, and often times people actually get injured from stretching or doing yoga or pilates.  Warming up and cooling down with a short walk is probably a better bet.

Anyway, cool guy!  And now I've got a renewed excitement to get back to my run training.  I was planning to start increasing my run intervals until I was running a full 10K, which was my goal for shorter-distance triathlons.  But now I'm wondering if it might be faster for me to keep some walk breaks...  I think I'll experiment some over the next couple of weeks with my normal 3:1, as well as some higher and lower ratios like 2:1, 1:1, 5:1, and 9:1.  I'll keep you posted!