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Week Of 2/12-18


  • Monday: Sick - no run
  • Tuesday: Sick - no run
  • Wednesday: Sick - no run
  • Thursday: Sick - no run
  • Friday: 4 miles in 27:22 - Felt totally depleted
  • Saturday: Sick - no run
  • Sunday: Sick - no run
  • TOTAL: 4 miles on 1 day of running
Well this week sucked. What started last weekend just got worse all week. I had (still have) a cough I can't shake and I've been just totally drained of energy. It's just the kind of thing that there's no point in trying to train through.

So now there's basically two months to race day, and my cram training is already off the rails. That's okay, because I've been re-evaluating my plan and I'll be making adjustments. I'm still working out the nuts and bolts, but here are the general focuses, in order of importance:
  1. Aerobic endurance, mostly at lower intensities (up to but generally not beyond Aerobic Threshold, or marathon effort). I'm a very slow twitch runner and I know I respond well to the consistency of this training, so at this point I just need to pile on the miles. I've gotten in trouble in the past with trying to fit in too much intensity before marathons, so I'm basically taking the opposite approach.
  2. Fat-for-fuel efficiency. In most of my marathons I've crashed hard in the second half of the race, even though I can totally knock out my 20+ mile long runs in practice. For whatever reason I burn up a lot of glycogen when I run, and I think it's because I run my normal days too fast and my recoveries too slow. So the relaxed aerobic endurance training will help counter the first problem (as long as I'm doing plenty of mileage and long long runs), and alternation fartleks will help with the second.
  3. Limited, controlled fast running. I actually had a lot more of this in my original schedule, but at this point I don't think I'll have the foundation to support it through the next two months and I'm worried that I'll burn up marathon performance with too much focus on fast running. Speed kills, distance doesn't. 5k-10k specific fitness is fun and the sexy thing to work out, but it's just not that specific to the long term marathon goal. I'll get my faster running mostly through a few road races and fartleks.
Having a long weekend of no work and just laying on the couch watching the Olympics has been helpful, I think. Anyway, I'm definitely running tomorrow, even if it's mind-numbingly slow.
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