Let me just start with this, what an f'd up phrase that is. However deranged that may be, it sums up this blog perfectly.

One of my goals for 2019 is to run an 8-minute mile. It's not that I enjoy running, it's that being able to run an 8-minute mile is an excellent health marker. My beginning time was 9:15. Now considering I have no interest in running regularly, I need a plan to accomplish my goal. One way would be sprint training.

So I embarked on my sprint training this week. After a good 15-20 minute walk with my 40 lb weight vest and a little bit of stretching, I performed 3-30 second hill sprints. They absolutely sucked, but I could handle them. The good thing about conditioning hard is that, if it doesn't kill you, you actually feel really accomplished afterward.

Here's the issue though. I have chronic back and hip issues. I'm not going to bore you with them, but they have been prevalent for years and I'm constantly working on them. Anyway, I have developed some pretty severe IT Band/Piriformis pain in the last week or so. Hmmmm, I wonder how that could have come about? Perhaps it's the new sprint training?

Well, there's no real way to tell for sure other than removing the sprinting. That's not to say I won't be able to sprint in the future. If so, however, I'll need to figure out what I need to stretch and strengthen so that it's not causing me pain and injury.

Because I am not going to be sprinting does this mean I am putting my 8-minute mile on the back burner? Hell no! I just have to find another way to skin that poor cat.

What I have learned in the past from Wendler is that I don't have to run to get faster at running, I just need to condition hard. I ran my first 5k all the way through without ever really running as training. I was just conditioning really hard. So to skin the poor kitty I'm going to do hiit training on the airdyne.

The airdyne is brutally effective and has not had negative impacts on my body in the past. Maybe I'll hit the track this week and get a new mile time established then retest it in a few months to see how effective the training really was and what kind of carryover it had.

In the past, I would have just kept pushing and beating myself up further. It took me a long time to figure out a new approach. You'd be wise to learn from this. Pushing through an issue doesn't make you hardcore or tougher. You can usually find an alternative approach to reach a goal. You can train smart and still train hard.