March Madness

March Madness doesn’t just refer to college Basketball, March Madness refers to the end of winter and the beginning of spring in some places the end of one tax year and the beginning of the next, if you’re a farmer it would refer to the new arrival of new lambs or calves. A lot of people go a little crazy in March , you see them out running in shorts and t-shirts when its only +5’C, out you may see them out on the track and their hammering out intervals quicker than they have done all winter. But by April they are back into their snug winter routine.

As an athlete I have found that March is a long transition month into racing, by that I mean April or even May is when the true racing season begins, in years past (almost a life time ago) the first race of the season was among the most important races of the year and for reasons that escape me now I don’t know why. Myself and my friends would get as fit as possible for that first race and more than likely it would be raining and we would end up having a pretty mediocre race. Now I try not to get carried away with the training in March but it happens to the best of us, it’s sometimes harder to hold back than to let yourself run with the energy that is bubbling up inside of you, the white stuff is starting to go away the days are getting longer and the air is getting warmer and you want to see what all of that training over the winter has done to your fitness levels. But as much as these are good reasons to start upping the training, by pushing too hard in March there is a good chance that by May you’ll be done either physically or mentally and won’t want to train once the really good weather gets here nor will you be thinking of the Fall races such as a marathon.

So try to hold back on increasing the intervals, if you’ve been doing 5 times whatever the distance don’t move to 6 times the interval just yet. If you’re running a race or 2, what result you get at this time of the year will almost be forgotten by the time October rolls around, so don’t get that upset if you don’t run according what you thought you would do. Use March as a stepping stone to bigger and better things later in the season.

Later...