Still Running

The summer has been going well. Since the big move, things have settled a bit and I've been able to get back into a running routine. Thus far my training weeks have gone: 44 miles, 52 miles, 60 miles, 66 miles, 60 miles. I've done a number of 14 mile runs, and my longest run thus far has been 17.25. This weekend I have another long run scheduled. It will be a 2:45 run and may or may not get me to 20 miles. I'll let you know how it goes. The 17 miler was slower than my typical long runs (8:37 pace), but it was a challenging course and I'm running more miles than I normally do. The day after I ran a killer 10 mile workout. Still, slow long runs don't exactly yield confidence for me, but that's where I am right now.

As far as marathon training goes, it's probably too early to tell how things are going. More miles is tiring. Well, it's either the miles or an almost 5 year old and 2 year old running around...I'll let you decide. I don't have a definitive training plan, which is typical for me, but I am more committed this time around. Looking through the Run Faster book, I found a table that loosely identifies miles per week with competitiveness and race distance. Sort of in the middle is just competitive. For the 5K, that's 40-50 miles, which is what I was running when I ran 18:48. For the half marathon, that's 50-60 miles, which is what I was running when I ran 1:29:11. For the marathon, that's 60-70 miles, which has never been what I've run (except in college when I only ran the 5K). I've also never been able to run the marathon times that the calculators say I should be able to run based on my other race distance times. So, it's probably not so surprising that this time around I'm making an effort to stay between 60-70 miles. I'm also making more of an effort to let go of some of my ridiculous interval workouts and replace them with slower tempo and MP runs. It's hard though. I like the feeling of short and fast, but I don't think it's really helping my marathon time. It's hard to say how things will go. There are still almost 12 weeks to go, and that's a long time. Right now, other than being tired, I seem to be holding up okay.

And just for fun I'll leave you with a couple pics.  :)

 The ladies found my iPod.

I have no idea what Em is doing, but she's cute.

I hope everyone else's training is going well!