I may need another cup of cofffee!

Wednesday, July 31, 2013 · Mike Davis

Woke up before the alarm clock this morning but man could I have slept for another couple of hours! Hopefully this cup of coffee will do the trick before I had down to workout. This week is the beginning of a 12 day stretch at my job with the Air National Guard and it appears that it won't be an easy stretch on me. Rest is definitely important for me as it should be for all of you runners. I'm not talking about the desire to sleep for 10 hours but just getting between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night makes a difference. All the latest information from the science world indicates that less than 7 hours a sleep increases our chances of weight gain and who wants that! Because I eat more deserts than I should, I don't want to also gain weight by not getting enough sleep either. The other part of not getting enough sleep is the affect on our running and workouts. I know for me when I wake up feeling wiped out like I do now, I struggle to even get to my workout and even once I'm there; the workout might not be my best effort. I try to get to bed early enough to give myself 7.5 8 hours of sleep but life sometimes makes that difficult. Even when I am successful in getting to bed early, I don't sleep great (part of getting older I guess), so it's not even a great 8 hours of sleep. I definitely try to be disciplined about my rest because I know it really matters. This week is purposely lite for me as I only have one individual client I'm meeting with to go along with my Monday- Wednesday 10K group training. Though I normally meet with a client after the 10K training on both nights, tonight she is out of town so I decided to take advantage of that and have a 10K team pizza night. It's always nice to have a little social time with the groups so we can get to know each other a little better though runners tend to talk about running when they aren't running. It will be fun and who doesn't like pizza? The end of the week will get busy administratively as the start of a new month means new training plans for all of my clients. As I have mentioned in the past I enjoy writing training plans and it's one of the key components at NFLR, but it takes a great deal of time as I put a lot of effort into each one. I spend a couple of hours reviewing the logs from the previous month then figure out the best way forward for the current month. I also take into account the individuals needs, goals and personal schedule as I design the training plan. Some might just think that it's easy to just add miles to the previous months training plan but that's not even close to what I do. Each client is different and therefore their training plan needs a personalized approach. The goal is to maximize there training time and give them the best chance for success. I want provide anything less. Well time to get a moving, I sipped my coffee slower than intended so no second cup! The one cup helped, but I apologize if I have any mistakes with the blog this morning! Oh yeah, a quick shout out to Jaime Pridham and her successful 10 mile race last night! She text me to tell me that she not only had a great overall race, but her last mile was under 8 minutes! Great job Jaime and to think a year ago this time you couldn't run 2 miles! Total success story! One last sip of coffee...