1.4 miles - Runstreak day 2 - 3/8/12

So, inspired by a fellow DailyMiler who just passed his 100th day of a run streak - I've decided to start one myself.  While this may sound strange coming from someone who has been adamant about rest and not running junk miles, my new enthusiasm for Chi Running and trying to improve my form has provided me with the perfect excuse to attempt such a thing - daily repetition and practice to enhance muscle memory.

Truthfully, most of the days of this streak I intend to be low mileage - just a mile or two probably 4-5x per week.  The idea is that this will not be enough to require any real recovery, but by concentrating on form for the 15 minutes or so every day, my hope is that the form improvements I'm looking to achieve will come faster.  Especially when compared to trying to improve form at the same time I'm doing a typical quality run, where I'm also trying to pay attention to HR, pace and maintaining form over a longer distance.  It'll also provide an interesting experiment to see how it impacts recovery.   I have a pretty good sense of the length and type of recovery I need currently for how I run - so if I run really low volume on a daily basis, and it impacts my recovery, I should be able to detect that.  Obviously my hope is that it impacts it for the better (many people claim it does).

Plus, on days where I do a bike workout, this should give me lots of opportunities for practicing the brick transition and getting the posterior chain (used for running, not so much for biking) active after hopping off the bike.

So, today was day 2, since I did the 4 miles yesterday - and today it was a whopping 1.4 miles.  All I wanted to concentrate on today was the very basics of Chi Running - lean forward slightly from the ankles, foot movement looking like a circle (as viewed from the side), and engaging the lower abs to slightly rotation the front of the pelvis up to be level.  What I found about halfway through was pretty interesting - if I stopped leaning forward so much, I'd slow down.  If I leaned forward a tad more, I'd speed up.  Yesterday I found this video showing how the four different gears of Chi Running impact speed - basically, the more lean, the more speed.  So it was pretty interesting that I found this to hold true.  Now, whether my form was acceptable or not at the higher speeds, I don't know.  But that is something I'm hoping to find out by video analysis via coaching session.