The Goldilocks Effect.

Once there was a little girl.
She sort of strolled into a house which belonged to three bears.
Yadayadayada.
She ate the porridge which was just right.
Right fussy little twerp, she was.

Which brings me to the point... in the words of the Holy Bible (Ecclesiastes 11:4, to be precise...)

"He who watches the wind will not sow and he who looks at the clouds will not reap."

In other terms, if you wait for perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done.

How often are running conditions perfect anyway? A week in March, and another in October, maybe? For the rest of the year where I live, it's either too hot, or too cold. That alone is enough for most people to never run. 

Ah well...to each his own. Me? I'll run all year.

I've read some stuff on the interwebs which says that training through summer will see you through to a good race in the fall. Makes sense to me. I get to test that theory out in the November chill during the ADHM.

But now I'm starting out on something which is quite the opposite. 

For the training cycle that started this week, the weather in the sauna that we affectionately call North India has started taking a slow but sure turn for the better. It feels good to do almost a quarter of my run in pre-dawn darkness, and finish well before the sun shows over the horizon.

And it'll just keep getting better for a while... before it starts getting worse. By the time I get to my last long run in the end of December, the temperature will be an uncomfortably chilly tennish.

Then, we taper and run a marathon in the sharply contrasting warmth of Mumbai.

I suppose whatever advantage the summer training has given me will pretty much have worn off by then. So to compensate for the inevitable slowdown in a race that is going to be in much warmer climes than the training leading up to it, I intend to run my easies about 25 to 30 seconds per km faster than what my plan designates, and my long runs and tempos about 10 seconds or so faster. 

Now I'm not sure if  the body works that way, but I'm pretty certain that the mind does. If I am convinced that I have done something to cater for it, psychologically at least, it should help me meet my goal. 

The way I see it, if Goldilocks hadn't been so damn finicky, she coulda had three times the porridge. Yeah, don't be her. Run whenever.
 
Week one of eighteen is done. I cheated on my recovery from my last marathon a bit. Ran an 8k tempo in the middle of the second week and a full out 10k race. In spite of those travesties, I'm glad to report I was feeling distinctly rested and strong as I began this new training cycle.

Here are my runs...