Beanie3, thanks for the welcome!
I might actually have been doing this longer than some folks. I started running casually years ago. But I only ran my first race last April.
Right now my training goal is the Los Angeles marathon in March next year. Toward that goal I'm planning a half-marathon in Long Beach (near Los Angeles) in October. And toward the October goal I am trying to get myself at least one 10k training day a week and one 13 mile training day every other week.
I know that kind of schedule isn't routine. The main book I'm using as a training guide is "Brain Training for Runners" by Matt Fitzgerald. It's full of arguably less traditional advice.
The biggest challenge I've had of late, besides wilting in the heat yesterday (and I suppose I must finally learn to convert temperatures to Celcius) is neck pain, which seems really counter-intuitive. I get this pain up the right side of the back of my neck, not by the spine, but the tendon that connects behind the ear. All my googling and asking around leads me to think it's really from my running posture, and in particular I'm beginning to think it's from a long term habit of carrying my left shoulder a little higher than my right. At least I finally found, on the RW boards, a stretch that seems to help: simply rotating the neck with the chin held high.
Do folks here tend to talk much about training times or just races? I hope both, 'cause I really don't race much.
