Temperature Rising

I hold the faint, fleeting hope that winter has completed its onslaught here. All right, before those of you who live in more arctic climes laugh derisively at my wimpiness, I will honestly admit two things:
First - twenty-plus years of living in Florida has thinned my blood to the consistency of a Pat O'Brien's Hurricane.
Second - I've probably thrown out every piece of true winter-weight clothing suitable for wearing to work or running.

If I lived in Chicago, or worked at Great Lakes it would be necessary to have good stuff. Yes, that leather bomber jacket was barely functional without a sweater/vest underneath. Seriously microwaved cup of coffee makes a good handwarmer...for a time.

However, it's 60-something degrees this morning, and I hope it will stay like this for at least a few days. It makes everything a little more tolerable; the walk from the car to the pool at 5:30 for swim workouts, the walk from the car to the office for work, even the evening track workout. When the local university is on spring break like it was last week - okay, what school decides to place it's spring break period in the beginning of February? I digress again. Everything was shut down, minimally-lit & barren. Makes it difficult to keep motivated, & that doesn't include the issue of the bathrooms.

We were leaving our workout as a friend, an ex-university cross-country coach/national-class marathoner was coming in to get his workout. How shocking to hear he hadn't run more than a dozen miles a week since the beginning of the year, but his focus has been on academics. I bet his 12 quality miles were more effective than my 40-50 junk miles...junk being a relative term.

Don't know if he could run a marathon, or a half-marathon on 12 miles a week. I know I probably couldn't. Heck, I'd think twice about marathoning on 40-to-50 a week. Maybe I could do it, but it would probably be ugly like an ape.

It's not just a question of quantity, but also of quality, when you're talking about mileage. I'm a firm believer in cross-training to maintain aerobic fitness. It's not running, but you can get the heart rate up without taking the pounding the equivalent running miles would produce. I haven't figured out the proper blend of cross training-to-easy running-to-to hard running yet, but I'm working it. Probably, like most everything else in life, it varies from person to person.

What works for me doesn't always work for the athletes I coach. But it's usually a good range.