Next up on the horizon

The City Park Runners Marathon and Half-Marathon training clinic came to a close this past week. And for this spring season, I've run 2 half marathons and 1 full, and I feel I did pretty decent time-wise, even the bad moments were positive, in that I was able to learn a great deal from the failures as much as the successes. There's a lot of work still to do in order for me to get to where I want to go, but with this year's past clinic I got in a great base and foundation for my next target race, and that's the Twin Cities Marathon on October 5th, 2014.

I wrote out a new marathon training cycle plan and I spoke with coach Dan and Erick about it and  got a lot of positive feedback in the layout with plenty of suggestions and tweaks. It's a living document that will be modified but the one thing I learned this year...and that was from fellow CPR group runners Paul and Dr. Phil, was consistency is the key. To be consistent with everything and stay healthy is where I'll see the big jumps in performance. Asides from my Garmin GPS watch, I've taken to writing out my training in a journal to help me track my progress in a more organic way.

Recovery is also an important aspect in training and I've learned to listen to my body a lot more. So I'm taking a full week off before I start my new training cycle as I realized I was over training after doing a tempo-paced run early in the week and the next day both my achilles and hips were painfully sore. I spoke with Osty about this and he determined that I have been running too much the past month as I pretty much ran 3-half marathons in one week (WPS 1/2 and Fargo Full) and then took 1 week off and basically picked up from where I left off running the CPR clinic and doing the Thursday and Saturday group runs at quicker than normal paces as I 'felt' good but I wasn't really letting my body rest and it all caught up to me just this past week. Hence the self-imposed break...

Take a break!

This summer, with my base intact, I'll be working on hills and trails along with track work for my speed training and longer LSD runs as I want to get acclimatized to running 2+ hours with marathon pacing in between the middle miles of the LSD and the slow coming in the beginning and the end. Tempo runs will be a little longer too as the normal tempo distances CPR does on Thursdays are 10k, I'll be going 12-15k. Erick is not into the junk miles and quite frankly I don't like running too much for the sake of running so this summer a lot of my focus will be running with specificity in mind to boost my aerobic engine and train with paces that will bring me closer to that sub 4 hour marathon time. I'll also key in on a nutrition plan as I find it easier to eat healthier during the summer months and also learn the fine art of nutrition intake during LSDs as I want to get my body used to taking energy gels so I can go the longer distances. I've got a couple of key practice races pegged this summer that will test my fitness so I should have some indicators where I'm headed and what I need to tweak along the way.

Four months of preparation for one race...sounds about right.

Mileage since January
670.04 km / 416 miles