KRAC Blog

A German friend was telling me once how to drive from one city to another. Looking at the map, I estimated that it was about a three hour drive. "Well," he said, if you are going to get there in that time, you will have to drive as fast as you can, whenever you can." What he meant was that, although there are stretches of the Autobahn where the only limits on speed are the limits imposed by your car, your body, and the laws of physics, there are substantial stretches where there are regular speed limits. Germans being Germans, they are serious about rules, and they take their speed limits quite seriously. So if you are going to make time, you have to go as fast as you can, whenever you can, because when you can't, you can't.

This is a pretty good rule for a lot of things, not just travel. It was too cold yesterday for me to want to go run outside, but I'll be out of town Wednesday and Friday, which will knock those days off my schedule, so I knew I had to do something. What I ended up doing was riding my bike to my office, working a while, then going to the gym for some tempo work on the treadmill, a little upper body work with the iron, and a twenty minute swim. With the bike ride back, it turned out to be a pretty good day on my training calendar, and I felt like I'd gone as far as I could as fast as I could on a day when I might otherwise not have done much at all.