Talking with Sasha and Sarah about Fitness

I was visiting my dad for his birthday (yesterday was Dad's and Kevin's birthdays) and dropped by Sasha and Sarah Pachev's house and ended up visiting with them for a couple of hours. We talked with them about a lot of things, but - most important - their whole family gave me lots of running information.

Sasha wants me to start doing some 5K's so that I can get an idea of where I am fitness wise. I have agreed to do one on New Year's Eve afternoon in Provo, but it may take a couple of tries for me to learn to push myself. One of the things I have learned the past year and a half is that I have not lived up to my potential. In order to get to my potential, I will have to learn to live with some discomfort and that is going to take some practice (this makes sense to me - but might not to anyone else). I have to learn to train and race hard instead of just training and racing comfortably and being pleased with improving as my fitness improves.

One of the steps Sasha recommends that I do is start doing striders on my runs. Right now I am doing 25 step increments of pushing myself hard and then slowing down, recovering a bit and doing this over and over again on a run. When this starts getting comfortable I will increase to 50 steps, then 100, 200, etc.

Sasha thinks that I am actually faster than I think I am. He challenged me to do a treadmill run. What I need to do is set the treadmill at 6.6 mph (which would put me on track for a close to 4 hour marathon) and then run until I get thrown off the treadmill. Gulp!

In order to cope with the snow and ice they also recommend that I run fast when the ground is clear of ice and then run slow when it is slippery. That way I will vary my pace during a training run.

Sasha suggests I work on modifying my diet and trying to get my weight down to 130 pounds. He thinks that would be an optimal weight. Both he and Sarah gave me some good ideas on eating better by eliminating processed foods and sugar out of my diet. I don't think I will go as extreme as their family does, but I plan to implement most of their suggestions. Sarah has a recipe blog in the FastRunningBlog community and I am going to check it out more.