Trail Running Blog

Week 2 Training & Race Week

This is the first (of 3) weeks where I have to modify my Sunday long run and run during my off days to make up for it. I have a 5K tomorrow, which I’m definitely underestimating. Ever since I ran the half marathon, I feel like any race shorter than that distance is easy, which is totally not the case. Shorter races involve a lot more speed and you have to strategize about how much speed to use at what time. For all of my past 5Ks, I have started off too fast, which just tired me out for the rest of the race (you’d think I learned after the first time..). What I liked about the half marathon is that running that fast so soon at the beginning of a 13.1 mile race is literally suicide. So when I held back the first couple of miles of my half, I was surprised (and happy) to see how much more energy I still had even after running so many miles already. I finally got the concept of pacing, too bad it took me over a year of racing to finally understand.. 🙂

Anyways, back to marathon training. I was supposed to run 14 miles for my long run, but will only do 3.1 that day (+ any extra miles I run during my warmup/cooldown). So I decided to break down the other 11 miles throughout the week on my off days. After these crazy 3 weeks, I am definitely going back to the training plan and taking those days off, or cross training. I have been so exhausted (sleeping through alarm clocks and everything!) the past 2 weeks, I know it’s from running all these miles.

I mentioned on DailyMile how much I am enjoying running longer distances (at slower paces, but I’m ok with it). It just feels good to be able to run such a long distance, consistently too. We’ll just see what I have to say once I get up to those 20 mile runs. I may be back to complaining about running long distances after that. The splits for Tuesday’s easy 8 miles ranged from 7:56-8:18, with each mile only 5-10 seconds apart. I made sure that I didn’t run too fast, but not lose focus and slow down too much. It appears it was the right balance. Thursday’s speed workout was faster than expected. I was supposed to run 2 1-mile intervals at 6:13 pace. I can usually run that at the end of a workout so I didn’t really think it would be too hard. I got a little too ambitious and ran my fastest mile in months (or years) at 5:37 and was able to slow down to a 5:45 for the 2^nd one. I really need to focus on running at the paces the program is asking. The chances of burning out will increase if I go too far above and beyond these first couple of weeks. I keep forgetting that there are 8 more weeks to this program 🙂

Monday: 4 mi, 33:44, 8:26 min/mile
Tuesday: 9 mi easy: 1:12, 8:00 min/mile
Wednesday: 4 mi, 35:30, 8:52 min/mile
Thursday: 7 mi, 53:53, 2 1-mile intervals: 5:37, 5:45
Friday: 8 mi easy/recovery, 1:05, 8:07 min/mile
Saturday: 4 mi, 37:55, 9:28 min/mile
Sunday: 5K (see future post)

Total Miles: 39.1 miles
Avg HR: 147 bpm
Total Calories: 4,224 calories
Total Pushups: 555 pushups