The change in the Boston Qualifying times really woke me up out of my winter work out slumber. As regular readers of this blog know, I would very much like to BQ, but I am very far away from that goal. With the new qualifying times, this is a goal that just got a lot harder. For a man of my age, I’d need to run a 3:10 just to make the cut off, to make the “A” cut off, I’d need a 2:50. That’s over an hour off my current PR.  I think it is time for a bit of a reassessment of where I am and where I want to be.

I am not built for running. I’m too tall, too bulky, and I took up the sport too late in life. But those are all excuses; there are plenty of people taller than me, bulkier than me and older than me who have BQ’ed. The only reason I cannot is a lack of commitment.

So, what is it going to take? First and foremost, it is going to take resilience. E asked me last night how long I thought it would take for me to BQ, I said I thought it would take another two to three years. That is a long time to work towards a goal.  But you cannot re-craft yourself overnight. I have to realize that this is going to take time, and I need to break this challenge down into manageable chunks. Run a sixty mile week; run a 250 mile month; cut down the 5k time; run a 70 mile week; set a new half marathon PR, set a new marathon PR, etc. etc. Get faster, minute by minute.

The formula for getting faster is very simple. There are two main aspects to me getting a BQ – diet and exercise. If I can be consistent at a high level of performance in these two areas, I can get there. If I can’t reach a high level of performance, or I can’t be consistent, I’m screwed.

For exercise, the formula is pretty simple – run lots, mostly easy, sometimes hard. The goal is to get my running back up to fifty miles a week pretty soon here, stay there for a month with no workouts (adding miles and workouts at the same time was what got me injured earlier this year). After a month at 50, I’ll add work outs, hopefully sometime in mid April. Then I will take it from there gradually increasing mileage while incorporating more workouts until I’m somewhere around seventy miles with two “work outs” a week.

To this basic equation for running success I am adding flexibility and body weight work and even more cardio. I have a post in the works specifically about the flexibility and body weight work, but suffice it to say while the benefits of this type of exercise to running may be debatable, what isn’t debatable is that my body is craving it and I enjoy it.

For the cardio, I am going with the more is better mantra. I hope to get back on the bike starting with one day commuting to work next week, and building from there. I have long dreamed of exercising ten hours a week. I hope to get there by the middle of March.

Diet deserves its own post as well, but for now, I’ll say I need to get my eating under control and lose another ten pounds. Currently I am at 175 or so (down from a high of 198) but I’d like to be somewhere between 160 and 165.

I am not one for diets. I can’t stick to them, but what I need to remember is that while I run a lot, I still eat too much, and too unhealthily. Just making smarter decisions about what I eat and how much of it I consume would be a good start.