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[[File:Yosemite.JPG|right|thumb|500px|Running in Yosemite in October 2014. (One of the advantages of [[Running With A Smartphone]] is you always have a camera with you.)]]
This is not the log of each workout I do, but rather a higher level summary of what's happening with my training overall. For a detailed log, I use [[SportTracks]] and publish to [[Dailymile]] at http://www.dailymile.com/people/JonathanS.
==2014 Rievew==
I'm rather unusual for a competitive ultrarunner because I [[How Often To Run| typically run 4 days/week]]. I'm also a little unusual because I often experiment on myself, including experiments where I try to prove myself wrong. As a result, I tried running every day for the second half of 2011, which resulted in a mild case of [[Overtraining Syndrome]]. In 2014 I revisited this experiment, with a number of modifications from my 2011 regiment.
* Back in 2011 I was running once a day, with 5-6 relatively similar days of Long Slow Distance and 1-2 easier days. This approach gives quite high mileage, and I ran 3,137 miles in the 6 months. This gave me a [[Training Monotony]] of around 2.5-3.0,
* For 2014 I ran 2-3 times per day, but aimed to keep my [[Training Monotony]] as low as possible. To achieve this, I ran 20-30 miles/day for 4 days/week, and around 6 miles/day for the remaining 3 days/week. My mileage was lower than in 2011, with 5,262 miles for the year. I ended up with a Training Monotony of around 1.5-2.0, which is still much higher than the 0.9-1.2 I have when running 4 days/week.
This experiment has been interesting for a number of reasons.
* I found it dramatically easier to run a given distance split over multiple runs in a day compared with a single run. A single 30 mile training run is tough, but splitting this into 20 miles, 6 miles, and 4 miles is relatively easy. Relatively.
* I've come to enjoy the short evening runs. It can be tough to get out of the house, but I feel much better afterward. I also believe that practicing running through the sunset will help on ultramarathons.
* As indicated by the science behind [[Training Monotony]], small increases in my mileage on the easy days had a disproportionate negative impact on my recovery and fitness.
* Knowing the importance of keeping the easy days short and light is not the same as being able to put it into practice. It's amazingly tempting to tack on a few miles to the easy days, especially if I wanted to bump up my mileage. Adding 5 miles to a 3 mile run is trivial (at the time), where adding 5 miles to a 20 mile run is a different proposition.
* I find it hard to do speed work while running high mileage. I did include a number of [[High Intensity Interval Training]] workouts, but these are the first things to be abandoned as fatigue sets in. I also stopped doing my [[Downhill Running| Treadmill Descents]], which are probably the most important workouts I do.
* I found a strong tendency to deteriorate into mediocrity. My easy days became harder, my hard days became easier, quality workouts get dropped, which all creates a positive feedback cycle.
* Another danger is that of numerology. I would've abandoned my experiment much sooner, but I noticed my rolling 12 month average mileage was over 5,200 miles. The goal of averaging over hundred miles per week pushed me on when I knew it would be better to change.
===Yearly Totals===
[[File:2014YearlyMileage.jpg|none|thumb|500px|My yearly mileage for the last 10 years, along with a count of the number of runs.]]
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