Mark's Blog

I don't know much about running, nothing about performance plans, and even less about sticking to a workout schedule, but I'll comment anyways (because that's the way the Internet works):

Maybe you're hitting the dip where all learning curves go after you easily acquire the first 50% of a skill. Making real progress now is really hard physically, not as simple as just motivating yourself to run. Also, the easy high you used to get from running is harder to get for a variety of physiological reasons.

But maybe you already knew this.

Hitting a plateau is probably normal in the asymptotic progression towards as good as you can do... before you inevitably start to decline.

It feels like I'm running into something different this week, because performing not nearly as well as I normally do seems inordinately hard.

That's not supposed to happen naturally after only a couple years of running. The books I read on the subject say that it's more likely either illness, and so temporary, or overtraining, a phenomenon whereby you train enough that your body does not manage to recover before you go out and train again. So you grind yourself down and lose, rather than gain fitness.

The solution to both problems is to back off. So I guess I should.