Marathon Monday!

Hey everyone! Happy Monday! My apologies for skipping out on last week's post! I did manage to get all of my training in but I took a surprise trip to Houston to visit my boyfriend and well, blogging wasn't at the top of my priorities list!

Training has been going great and I'm feeling really good! My long runs had been really tough and shaky until yesterday when a 13 mile run knocked some confidence back into me! The run was on a treadmill no less! I woke up in the morning to thunder and lightning and didn't want to cancel my workout so I headed to the gym and spent 2 hours running on a treadmill to get in my workout!

I'll have to remember this when I'm at Mile 24 of the Marine Corps Marathon!

Just to recap last week's training since I missed my post:

Monday: Rest Day
Tuesday: 4 miles easy (9:58/mile) with 4 strides
Wednesday: 7 mile hill workout
Thursday: Rest Day
Friday: 4 miles with 2 miles at Marathon Pace
Saturday: 4 miles easy (9:58/mile)
Sunday: 13 miles (9:58/mile)

The week before I had a Time Trial schedule. A Time Trial is just a 1 mile run that you do periodically to assess your fitness goals. I warmed up on the track for about 10 minutes, ran my mile and the cooled down for another 10. I managed to run my mile in 8:08 which I was pretty excited about! I'm hoping to shave off at least 8 seconds and come in at an even 8 minutes on my next Time Trial. 

Up until last week, my marathon training was all about slow, easy runs and with weekly hill runs. Last week, I added in 1 run at Marathon Goal Pace and 1 run with striders (30 second bursts where you pick up the pace and run nice, long strides). 

My goal for the Marine Corps Marathon was initially to break 4 hours which would put me at a 9:09 pace but lately, I've been thinking I'm capable of running much faster than that, so I ran last week's goal pace run at 8:46 and was surprisingly comfortable with it. So I'm sticking to it. The plan of attack for this week:

Monday: Rest Day (I did go swimming though, but it was easy swimming)

Tuesday: 5 miles easy (9:58/mile) with 5 strides

Wednesday: 6 mile hill workout

Thursday: 4 miles with 2 miles at Marathon Pace (8:46)

Friday: 6 miles easy (9:58/mile)

Saturday: 15 miles (9:58/mile)

Sunday: Rest Day

That's that! I usually take Thursdays as my Rest Day and run my long runs on Sunday but this weekend, my boyfriend is coming to visit and I want to get it out of the way before he gets here so I'm hoping that running 5 days straight won't affect me too much! Have you ever done this?

Have a great training week!

Marathon Monday!

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you had a great training week last week! I sure did! Despite the fact that I was still recovering from serious jet lag, had a very handsome Pilot pay me a visit and had 2 very evil professors impose an earlier than planned deadline for a 25 page paper, I still managed to get in all of my scheduled workouts!

While I missed Tuesday's 3 mile easy run because of said paper, I decided to double up on Wednesday and follow up a tough morning Hill Workout with an easy shakeout 3 mile run and just like that, I got in 30 happy (tough!) miles for the week!

This week is supposed to be a step back week from what should have been a 12-miler on Sunday but since I split that up into a 9 mile long run with a 3 mile shakeout, it's not going to be too much of a step back run for me but that is perfectly fine with me since I'm finally as of this week, in what should be Week 4 of Marathon Training, on schedule! So with that being said, Week 13 (remember, I'm counting down!) of MCM Training is going to look like this:

Monday: Rest Day (after 2 runs yesterday, I'm taking this one very seriously!)
Tuesday: 4 miles (10:04/mile)
Wednesday: 5 mile hill workout
Thursday: Time Trial (1 mile)
Friday: 4 miles (10:04/mile)
Saturday: 4 miles (10:04/mile) + Escape to Yoga Island!
Sunday: 10 miles (10:04/mile)

It's going to be a great training week! I'm especially excited for Escape to Yoga Island this weekend! Are you in the NY area? Let me know if you'll be there!

Next week marks the end of my easy 10:04 miles and the beginning of striders, marathon-pace runs (which I still have to figure out, longer hill workouts and faster runs...it's all part of Conquering 26.2 though and I can't wait for it!