The answer according to the article is that like most things that are worth giving a damn about, no one knows. Personally, I keep a little notebook in which I jot down my workout specs and how the workout felt. One such entry is about last Sunday, when I went on my weekly long run. I’m now on week 7 of the marathon training guide I found on the internet, so last Sunday’s run was 7 miles. I had some kind of virus and scratchy throat and felt my ass dragging like a sack of lead shot. I got passed, a lot. It was also 11 am and the temperature was already in the upper 80s. These are all the stuff of quitting, but I slogged on. I don’t know if it was worth it. Probably, since I didn’t really have a specific running-related problem–I just felt like crap. I had to take a nap and felt terrible the rest of the day from dehydration. Most days I am fine, and I keep the notebook to make sure I notice if I feel bad more than a few days in a row.

I am generally getting better at managing the kind of exhaustion I mentioned above. I am tired from training, every day. When I first started out training, I needed at least a two-hour nap after every run. Now I don’t know if I’m less tired or if I’m just better at ignoring it. Coffee helps, as does generally not running at the crack of dawn. We’ll see what happens after I switch to running at 6 am again. Unemployment and many cool days have allowed me to roll out in the late morning, sometimes even the early evening, but that will have to change if/when I get a job.

I haven’t experienced anything worse than being tired so far, though, which makes me cautiously hopeful that an old mystery hip problem I used to have may be less of an issue these days. Often when I had been running for a couple of weeks, I would develop this irritated, grating popping sensation in my left hip, with an accompanying vicious stabbing pain. I started to favor my left leg, which led to my right knee getting thrown out of whack, a situation known as a compensation injury, or dumbass syndrome. According to Keith Hanson, some guy quoted in the NYT article, “If you are gimping — altering your gait— after 10 minutes of running, then it is an injury and not just an ache or pain”. That advice, plus my notebook, is so far working out well enough for me.

• Hal Higdon’s Marathon Training Guide This man is incredible. He has a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate website full of useful information and training plans for every level of ability. Couch-dwelling chain-smokers and shirtless, bony-chested, whippet-thin racers alike can finally dine at the same table, and that table has a website, and that website is halhigdon.com.  I’m on week 6 of the Novice program. That means I will run 7 miles tomorrow. Hooray!
• Stumptuous.com Krista, the webmistress of stumptuous.com, is your much cooler weight-lifting big sister. She has years of experience and there is not one ounce of bullshit on her site. She taught me how to do squats. I use her example training program for a recreational middle-distance runner (scroll down–it’s example #2).
• MapMyRun.com I don’t even think I’d have gotten out the door without this site. It’s similar to gmaps pedometer, which never seems to work for me. Basically, you can point ‘n click draw your running route over a map and have the distance calculated for you. You can also save maps into a training log, which I especially like. No more scribbling running schedules on loose cocktail napkins!

Those are the three sites I use often. I’m always using Google for this or that arbitrary question–how to stretch my hips, or a good free-weight substitute for lat pulldowns–but I don’t have any other regulars in the daily exercise info/schedule queue. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions!