Week of Dec 2

Another week down, 56 miles planned, and 56.6 done.  Definitely dialed back the easy day effort this week — wore a heart rate monitor that kept the pace low most days, but threw in some Oslerians (2-1-:30-:30) on a hilly Wednesday run and had a good 6 mile tempo on Saturday.  Tempo speed still not quite up to snuff — mile splits Saturday were 6:04-5:58-6:06-5:49-5:47-5:59 for a 5:57 average — looking for something more like 5:40 eventually.  Overall, happy with the effort.  We’ve got 66 on the menu for next week, including 5 x mile at <5:30 on Wednesday and 17(!) mi on Saturday with ~7mi/40mins tempo.

Week summary on Strava.

Friday-Saturday

Missed my “academic” post on Friday, but have put two in the pipeline for next week (M-W).  Hopefully I can keep a bit of a buffer going forward.

Ran Friday night and really hammered about 2 miles at the end, forgetting I had a workout this (Saturday) morning.  Ended up only doing 20mins of a planned 30min tempo, and really struggled home this morning.  Overall still happy with week 1 of marathon training, but I’ll have to be better with gauging effort in the future.  Will likely break out the HRM in the future.

Friday, Saturday.

On the plus side, blew away a segment record on my Friday run, going 5:17/mi for 1.2 miles near the end.

Wednesday and Thursday

Plan was 9mi/5mi, went about a quarter mile long each day.  Felt great Wednesday, going pretty fast without feeling strained – after 2 warmup miles, settled into clicking off 6:30’s, with the last two right around 6:00.  Took it a little easier Thursday.  Walking a fine line this week between not racing every day and getting the wheels spinning while the mileage is low enough to not put me in a hole.  Strava links below.

Wednesday, Thursday

Monday and Tuesday

Planned to go 4mi/6mi, ended up going 5mi/7mi.  Ok for now.  Felt much better than Sunday, but still not rolling super well.  Hopefully I’ll get into a groove by the end of the week and have more focused efforts next week.  Links to Monday and Tuesday runs.

As an aside, Strava is fairly addictive, though not *quite* enough people appear to use it.  My recent guilty pleasure has been going and blasting nearby segment records (this morning took a segment record from 3:25 down to 3:06) — hopefully someone else will take them back so there’s some competition to it!

Nov. 25

5miles, exactly as planned.  Was feeling awful tired most of the time, but I guess that’s to be expected early in the training cycle.  On the plus side, I don’t appear to have any lingering injuries or new ones from my recent hiking adventures.

Marathon training starts today

Haven’t posted much on my own running, but wanted to stay honest on this one.

Not me, but at least I took the photo.

Building up to the 2013 Austin Marathon, with a goal of sub-2:30, which should be good for a top-5 (top-1?) finish.  Training started today, after 2+ weeks entirely off, the first time I’ve managed that in quite a while.  Hoping that a 12 week focused buildup will work well.  My daily mileage is borrowed mostly from here, though the 90 mile week I will likely substitute 10-12-15-11-10-22-10 to keep the second long run down a little bit.

Additional workouts will be marathon pace (5:30-5:50) segments built into the long run, starting at ~30 minutes this week and building up to (hopefully) ~90 minutes.  These will be negative splits.

Wednesdays will be faster pieces, ~5 miles at 5:00-5:20/mile, broken up at first, and (hopefully) continuous by the end of the cycle.  I’ll bring the Wednesday workout in after two weeks of training.

Weekly mileages (tempo time, Wednesday workout):

• Nov. 25 45mi (30mins)
• Dec. 2 56mi (35mins)
• Dec. 9 66mi (40mins, 5xmile, 2mins recover)
• Dec. 16 78mi (45mins, 4 x 2km, 90s recover)
• Dec. 23 66mi (50mins, 4 x 1.5mi, 90s recover)
• Dec. 30 78mi (55mins, 3 x 3km, 60s recover)
• Jan. 6 90mi (2 x 2.5mi, 60s recover, long run pushed back one day)
• Jan. 13 78mi (3M half marathon the 13th, 70mins the 19th, 2 x 3mi, 30s recover)
• Jan. 20 90mi (80mins, 5miles continuous)
• Jan. 27 90mi (90mins, 2 x 3mi, 30s recover)
• Feb. 3 78mi (60mins, 5miles continuous)
• Feb. 10 70mi (no saturday long run, 3miles continuous, race sunday)