First off, many congrats to Alix (Scott’s niece) on her 2nd place finish in the 100m breaststroke at the state championships! Way to go, Alix!!
Training continues to go well overall. I’m at the point where I’m beginning to get a bit panicky that I’ll trip over the dog, fall down the stairs, or simply fall over while standing (it’s totally happened before), break my ankle and mess up all this hard work. Hopefully that won’t happen but even if it does I’ve enjoyed the journey and certainly have benefitted from the training discipline!
Moved my long run to Sunday this weekend so I’m in the rhythm for race day and did 14.5mi as part of the ‘taper’ process. Despite starting my run in mighty cold wind and rain things went really well - running my fastest average pace yet by nearly a full minute and being several minutes faster than my usual long run pace. This run: 14.45mi in 2:35 = average of 10:47/mi. Major difference though is the course I ran this weekend is almost completely flat so I’m sure that helped out . On the flip side my nutrition for the two days prior completely sucked so I wasn’t fueled properly for the effort. Still there’s a glimmer of hope for a sub 5 hour marathon yet but only if all the stars align and I’m (for me) fast like the wind. My goals in order of priority remain 1. Crossing the finish line 2. Running the whole course without walk breaks THEN 3. Running it as quickly as possible while still accomplishing #1 and #2.
Did some serious speed intervals on the treadmill this morning running 75 minutes of high intensity interval training (HIIT) consisting of 15x with 4minute run/1minute jog intervals. I was at sub 9 minute miles for some of the latter sets so I was quite happy. This speed work really seems to be helping me get faster – I hope to keep it up even during the ‘off season’. The trick for me is to keep upping the speed on both the working time (4minutes) and the rest time (1 minute) by 1/10th with each interval. So if I start the first interval at level 6.0 for the work time and 4.0 for the rest when I start the second interval I up the work level to 6.1 and the rest to 4.1 and so on. As I get really tired I even break the work interval up into four 1 minute sections and do the first minute at only .1 up then .2 and so on – breaks things up into smaller chunks so I can tell myself “you can do anything for 60 seconds” and gets me greater gains than just .1 each interval.
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