Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Marathon Training Week #6



Tuesday: rest day. 

Wednesday: ran about 6 miles on the tready.  I say “about” because there was discrepancy.  I seriously believe the treadmill that I was on was in serious need of calibration because it was about a mile off from what my Garmin said I ran. 

Thursday: another rest day.  However, I did do 2000 meters on the row machine on my overnight overtime shift.

Friday: time for some speed work!  I was going to do some back and forth sprints in the parking lot of my apartment complex, but at the last minute, decided I didn’t want to do that simply because of an out-and-back warm up AND cool down.  Meh to that!  So, instead I ran the 2 miles to a big church with a big parking lot at an easy pace to warm up.  I went to the far side of the parking lot so I’d be out of the way and started sprinting 50 meters with 50 meter recoveries.  I threw in the occasional 150 meter recovery when I was noticing my sprints were starting to slow down.  My fastest pace, probably only held for about 3 seconds, was a 4:47!!!  WHOA!  I did sprints for a mile, then ran the 2 miles back home nice and easy.  A GREAT workout!  This one will definitely get done again. 

Saturday: this was supposed to be a cross training day but I took it as a rest day because I was just so tired.  I did do 2000 meters on the row machine again on my overtime shift.

Sunday: long run day!!!  Did 14 total miles.  I did the last 3 miles as a “fast” finish.  I actually hit my long, slow run pace of 12+ min/mi and then around 10:45 min/mi for the final 3.  I felt great and strong for the whole run.

Monday: had an early morning appointment for some lab work before I have my annual physical next month, and since I was halfway from my apartment to Ladybird Lake trail, I drove there and did the 7 mile loop.


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And week #6 is D-O-N-E!  I’m about or just over 1/3 of the way through my marathon training for the South Padre Island Marathon in November.  As each week goes by, I get more and more excited about seeing my hard work pay off.  I’m really hoping I can hit my goal.  And I’m going to go ahead and lay that out there right now…4 hours 20 minutes OR FASTER.  That would PR me by over 15 minutes.  I know I can do it.  The course is like 98.5% FLAT.  If I can run a 4:35 on a fairly hill marathon course, I can for sure do 4:20 on a flat course with a more educated training cycle.  This isn’t close to a perfect training cycle, but it’s definitely better than what I’ve done in the past where I basically just logged the miles and did a smidge of hill training in prep for the Austin marathon earlier this year.  I’ve been doing speed work and some MGP runs.  But I do need to up my game and do ACTUAL tempo runs where I’m running between half and 10K paces for 80% of the distance I’m running.  And I should probably be doing these tempo runs the day after my long run so I can get my legs used to running faster when they’re a little tired. 

1 comment:

  1. Hi Sara,
    I don't know if you are at all like me but I find 10k/half-pace soooooo hard to hit in training. For those faster tempo runs this marathon training cycle I've taken to entering a shorter race every few weeks and using that as a tempo run. It's taken the fear out of it for me anyway. I tried doing those faster tempos on tired legs last year and while I had great results in my marathon (21 minute PR!) I also absolutely dreaded them! This year I'm looking for a smaller improvement but trying to not be fully miserable during the cycle. Best of luck with your training!

    ReplyDelete

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