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

Aftermath and lessons learned - to keep going forward towards that horizon

“Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.” Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Last week I ran the 10th Anniversary Fargo Marathon and I didn't reach the goal I set out for myself. Yes, I could have prepared better with more precision, but it is what it is and I ran as far and as fast as I can and I got the time circumstances gave me.

Now I can whine and complain about what happened, looking for fault in my training, preparation or any other outside or inside influence. But what's better, at least to me, is to take the time to feel sorry for yourself, then pick your sorry ass up and figure out how to do better.

So I took the following Tuesday and Thursday off to just basically recover and heal my body from all that running. I did a re-assessment on my body and found no real aches or pains so I came out of this race unscathed and my sister Connie, set me up for a re-match at the Twin Cities Marathon this coming October. I went back to City Park Runners store and joined the gang for the Saturday morning LSD. Aggie came early to pick me up in the morning and I, along with my Fargo running mates were greeted warmly with plenty of congratulations on the accomplishment. Osty was out at the cottage and he and his wife did a nice 5k run around the surrounding beach area. Red came by on his bike to ride alongside us runners and Aggie.

Erick gave me some sage advice on marathon preparation. And he gleamed that from reading my last entry on the race...it was because I applied Body Glide on my feet which caused a lot of slippage between my feet and the compression socks which then bunched up in between my toes which caused my feet to cramp which then caused me to slow down and drop off the course to make re-adjustments and then learn to get comfortable running sockless in my shoes...ugh. "Don't try ANYTHING new on race day" is what Erick told me and gave me that 'duh' look that I so deserved.

I didn't Body Glide my feet for the WPS 1/2 marathon...so why the hell now? No excuses as that was just plain idiocy on my part. This quote can pretty much sum up the folly of my ways. Oh to live and learn and dream and keep going again...

"All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path" Sigrid Undset