Year 2, Week 3 Wrapup

This was the first week of actual marathon training for the next marathon on January 3rd. I had been focused on speedwork and stuff for the last couple of weeks in preparation for the 5k, but I've been doing 12-14 mile long runs at least every other week since the last marathon, so I'm hopefully not too far off marathon shape.

I've got 7 weeks of training set up that will ramp up pretty quickly to a 20 mile long run, and still have the usual 3 week taper. The program's similar to the last one, except that it's much shorter obviously. Also, I've been averaging more miles, so this one keeps me up at around 30 miles/week, and is 4 days/week instead of the 3 days/week I was doing before.

The one other big change is that the paces I'm using are up to a minute faster than what I was using to train for the last marathon. That's pleasing to see, because it means I'm getting better. What's more pleasing is that I feel a lot better after running one of these faster runs than I did running slower runs in the last marathon training. Training for the last marathon, a 3 mile tempo run at 9:15 was a real struggle, whereas now I can do 5 miles at 8:30 without even really breathing heavy afterwards. I believe spending those few weeks focusing on the short distance speed has really paid off in terms of resetting my body's perception of what "fast" is and what "difficult" is. After spending a few weeks pushing myself to the limit of how fast I could go, everything slower than that seems easy now. For that, I am very thankful. If I can swing it, I think it might be a good plan to do that short distance speed focus between each marathon.

On Saturday, I was supposed to run 14 miles @ 9:48. I had planned it so that I would be out on Silverbell when my dad came through on the finish stretch of the El Tour de Tucson (a 109 mile bike race around the perimeter of Tucson). After finding him and cheering, I would head over to the Santa Cruz River trail, then head south for as many miles as I needed to, then turn around and head back to the place where I left my car getting its oil changed. I had timed this so that if I stayed exactly on pace, I would arrive at the car place exactly 10 minutes before they closed for the day. The turnaround point was entirely dependent on how much distance I had covered before getting on the trail.

Everything would have gone perfectly if the battery in my Forerunner hadn't died. I've noticed a problem with the Forerunner where sometimes it can turn itself on and get left on. When you put it into or take it out of its cradle, sometimes it comes on during that process. I don't know if it has something to do with dirty or worn contacts on the watch or in the cradle, or if it's just a defect in my particular unit, or what. I've also noticed that if you leave it in the cradle, but disconnect the cradle from the computer, it might turn on then. The upshot of this is that if I don't look closely anytime it's near the cradle, I risk losing battery.

So, on Saturday I turned it on 15 minutes before the run and saw that the battery was dead, so I gave it 15 minutes of charging before leaving. I didn't expect it to last the whole run, but it did last about 6 1/2 miles, so that was good. I was checking it more often than normal, especially when I was near a landmark I already knew the distance from, so that I would know how far I had gone when it eventually died. When it did die, I knew what the distance was when I passed the last landmark, so I could just change my route to head towards another point of known distance. From there, I headed home, and then ran back and forth between my house and other known points of reference until I had enough mileage to head to the car place 2 miles up the road. I planned to get to the car place after 13.5 miles, because I had no idea if my pace was way off and didn't want to risk being late.

When I got to the car place, I checked the clock and found I had been out for 128 minutes, which gives a pace of about 9:30 for 13.5 miles. I double checked all the distances on Google Maps afterwards, and I'm pretty sure I did 13.5 miles. So, as dependent as I am on the Garmin, I'm pretty impressed that I was able to figure it out old school, and that I was able to keep my pace as close as I did. I figure the slightly faster pace makes up for the slightly shorter distance.

It wasn't too long ago that a 14 miler like that would wipe me out for a few days, and make the trip down the stairs on the next couple of mornings a really agonizing journey. As I started getting better, I would use the morning stair trip as my gauge of what sort of an impact I was getting. If it hurt too much to go down the stairs in the morning, it was clear I was working really hard. If it only moderately hurt, then I was doing okay. As of now, it's been a couple of months since I was even the slightest bit sore going down the stairs, so either I'm just really used to this, or I need to work harder, or something. Schedule-wise, I think I'd have trouble going out more than 4 days a week, or going out for longer on each day. So, the only way to increase the mileage from here is to just run the miles faster. Thinking about it from that perspective makes me pretty certain that I want to focus on speed again after this marathon and renew my effort to get down to a 22:30 5k time before training for Ogden.

The other notable thing about this week is that looking back over my daily entries shows me that I ate a lot this week, and I've got a nice plateau in the weight graph to show for it.