After Marine Corps Marathon, and London Marathon before that, I said that the next time I ran a marathon, it’d be as a fun run without any goals and expectations and hence my training would similarly be simple and stress free. But that nagging goal remained and as I’d always suspected, I decided to give it another go.  A group of us running friends signed up for Revel Mt. Hood in Oregon on July 28th.

With 16 weeks to race day, my sort of Winter hibernation officially ended last week and it is now time to start a new marathon training cycle. I have maintained a good running base of ~ 20miles/week throughout the Winter with some the Red Top Rumble Trail race, the Cochran Mill Trail Race and the Publix Georgia Half Marathon. But with the start of the first “official” week of training, I was struck by how serious and different it felt inspite of it not being any different from the previous week’s workouts. That’s what makes for a successful training I suppose, being committed and disciplined enough to show up to train day in and day out, week after week, even when you don’t feel like it. You tweak things if needed, but always show up. Showing up is more than half the battle.

Monday – Starting of the week right with some stretching and core work at the Yogalates class

Tuesday – Joined Miss. FauxRunner at her track practice in the evening and ran 5 miles easy on the outer most track. 

Wednesday – 30 min lifting routine during lunch with a bike trainer ride in the evening. This was an ITL power series ride and even before I was through 15min, my legs were burning up. Ultimately, I bailed at an hour, 15 min before the finish. This was my first trainer ride in a long time that I couldn’t see through to the finish.

Thursday – Joined Miss. FauxRunner at track again and ran 7 miles. This was torture after the first 4 miles and I had to keep telling myself “just one more lap” over and over to get through. 

Friday – 45 min lifting routine followed by a 3 mile run on fatigued legs

Saturday – My motivation and my legs went missing! Miss. FauxRunner had a friend over for sleepover and I slept in. Running in the late after with her felt extremely hard, even though it was only 3.5 miles instead of my planned 5.

Sunday – Long run of 11 miles. Just happy to get through it as I had to mentally talk myself into going instead of my usual bounding out of bed in search of my running shoes.

Running on the track did have an advantage – my pace was WAY faster than other surfaces, by almost a minute. Worth the mental torture!

How is your training going?
Have you run on the track for non-speed workouts?