More on theTheme of "Invisible Runs"

On the heels of yesterday's post I felt I should 'splain my family dynamics a bit more, whne it comes to Ultrarunning.

My wife is a wonderful, loving, understanding  person, and is a former long distance runner, so she knows the drill.  But the plain fact is simply that she and the rest of my family are very jealous of my time. Let's face it, if I go out for a 25 miler on the Appalachian Trail near my home, you're talking a 6-hour run, plus drive time.  Boom--there goes half a day.  Vaporized.  And in 1998, when I ran the Massanutten 100, on Mother's Day weekend...that quest burned up a massive chunk of banked goodwill.

My solution has always been to run at "invisible" times--i.e., running at work whenever possible (my employeer espoused fitness time off) in lieu of going out for a longer/slower 1-hour run in the evening; beginning my long weekend runs well before dawn so as to be back by 8:00 AM; saving up my monthly "really long" run for when I was out of town on a business trip; etc. 

So I get creative to keep the peace.  We all, myself included, have our blind spots.  Some will say I should throw down the gauntlet at home, stake out my turf, dammit, and claim my rightful guilt-free leisure time.

But that's not my style or my personal choice. 

Ultrarunning Time Management

The following is adapted from a post I did to the UltraList some yeasr back, but still is quite relevant today.

========

First off, at the risk of stating the obvious, you have to set your running scheme based on your goals.  Just maintain fitness?  Do you want speed?  To extend your overall long-distance threshold?  To complete a specific ultra event?

Let me use my 1998 as an example.  I wanted to run the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-miler.  Didn't care about time, just wanted to finish.  I also wanted to keep the peace at home by keeping my training as invisible to the family (wife + 2 early teens) as possible.  This meant low mileage, and running at creative or even odd times and places (early, early morning; late evening; getting dropped off by my carpool for a run part way home or to work). 

So, to prepare I decided that my minimum run would be 10 miles.  With only a couple exceptions, whenever I laced up the running shoes I'd cover 10 miles or not go out.  For the 6 months prior to MMT, I did these 10-mile minimum weekday runs before work from 5:00 to 6:30 AM, generally twice a week.  Family didn't know, didn't care.  On the weekends my distance alternated between "short" and "long" weekend runs: 10 on the "short" weekend and 25 on the "long" weekend.  To maintain my cloak of invisibility I also did the weekend runs early so I wouldn't shoot half a day.

To get my distance threshold up, I threw in an ultra-distance run every other month (38, 40, and 50).  Now, these runs were in fact done during "prime time"--couldn't make them invisible.  In 1998, the year I completed MMT, my annual totals were:  1190 miles--107 runs--11.1 miles avg per run.  My numbers were real similar for 96 and 97. 

I guess I'm trying to make several points:

--Pick your goal and THEN design a training regime around it, BUT.....

--Do your goal picking with your loved ones in mind: no sense alienating those most important to you by embarking on a quest that comes at their unfair expense

--Do be fair to yourself: it is reasonable to plan activities, such as ultrarunning, that benefit no one else, for your own growth/dreams/fitness/etc.

--Scale back: you probably can be a successful ultra runner with low training miles