The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-378 – End of Season Contemplation with my Coach  (Audio: link) audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4378.mp3] Link epi4378.mp3 MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - http://www.marathonbq.com/qualify-for-the-boston-marathon-in-14-weeks/   Hello, and welcome to the RunRunLive Podcast episode 4-378, This is your dear friend Chris.  How is everything going?  I’m trying very hard to get back on my publishing schedule.  To get back in balance.  Not just because I believe consistency is a big part of quality in the product you consume here.  I do appreciate your attention and I’m grossly aware of my duty! I also need to keep writing to keep my own creative furnace fueled – which is why I started doing this in the first place – partly to help people, and myself, become better versions of themselves by sharing some of the tribal knowledge I’ve accumulated over the eons that I’ve been a practicing amateur endurance athlete.  But also to keep my communication skills tuned up – writing as well as reading this copy to you with as much gusto as I can recruit! Well maybe not gusto, but at least enviable sincerity.  Today we catch up with my coach, Jeff.  He and I talk through the ups and downs of my 2017 training season.  I like to use myself as a test subject to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s always important to look back at your training, your successes and your failures, to see if you can learn anything.  You’re never too old to learn.  We talked for a long time.  I’m going to edit it down to a reasonable size, but I’ll post the raw interview on the members feed. In Section One we will talk about over-training.  How to realize when you’re getting over-trained, what the symptoms are and how to avoid it.  In Section Two I’ll tell you 10 things you don’t know about me.  Like one of those Facebook posts.  It’s cold up here in New England now.  We are in full on Winter.  We’ve had some good snow to make everything festive.  It’s below zero Fahrenheit this week.  More importantly how is Buddy the old wonder dog?  Well, he just turned 14 years old.  Which is pretty damn old for a border collie. He’s and old man!  His hips don’t work so well and he’s deaf but he’s still mentally sharp.  He gets skinnier every day.  Skinny old man.  The kids dress him in sweaters this time of year.  They use him as a blanket to stay warm when they’re watching TV.  He is very warm.  He is well loved. He barks a lot.  Just like an old man, he wants to be heard and doesn’t have time for niceties.  He’ll stand in the front yard and bark at the woods at night.  Picture it as a 98 year old man in his underwear yelling at the coyotes to stay off his lawn.  “…when I was a boy… we had real coyotes, not these namby pamby city coyotes they got now…” … I ran out of podcasts to listen to last week.  I’ve been changing phones a lot and have lost some of the regular ones I used to listen to.  Some house cleaning and some pruning.  Podcasts come and go.  It’s an industry now and the old amateurs like myself are the anomaly. I opened the app and was looking around and went to see what Steve was doing over at Phedippidations.  The app sorted with oldest first, and I downloaded a couple of his marathon race reports from 2005.  The BayState Marathon and the Cape Cod Marathon. Steve did a great job with those old podcasts.  Compelling and interesting stuff.  Really well produced.  Entertaining.  You can hear how much in love he is with his training and racing and the newness of the sport and the community.  If you listen to the Baystate race episode you’ll hear my buddy Frank calling out Steve’s name at one of the first water stops, the one with the rock music playing.  That’s the same Frank who ironically qualified at Baystate with me a few weeks ago.  I wasn’t at the water stop in 2005.  I was running the race.  I think I ran both those races and came up short in both.  I think that year I ran a ra