Sunday, April 5, 2009

T-minus 5 Weeks...

It is now less than 5 weeks until the 2009 Fargo Marathon. It is about this time in my training where the marathon begins to consume my thoughts more and more. I am down to just one more race prior to the marathon, the Earth Day Half-Marathon in two weeks. Yesterday I ran the Bunker Hills 8K in Coon Rapids. I placed 6th overall, in 29:29, nothing fast at all. The course is hilly but I certainly could've been a minute faster or more had my hamstrings not tightened up with about 1.5 miles to go. The trails the race was on are trails I know way too well, so I knew every hill and turn. It just wasn't my day but that's the way things go sometimes. Needless to say, I'm not training for 8K's or even 10K's.

This week will be a short work week for me as there is no school on Good Friday. The WMHS track team has their first track meet of the season on Thursday so I'm excited to see how our runners' training has been going. My workouts for the first half of this week coming up will be pretty easy but the 3 day weekend is going to be a good challenge. I'm hoping with a few easy runs to start the week will give my legs, especially my hamstrings some time to recover and loosen up before the tough workouts come. I decided to take today off (my first in 3 weeks) to see if that will help.

Best of luck to all of those running either the Zumbro 100K or 100 mile this weekend. The weather looks like it will cooperate for you. I will be sleeping while you all get your race started but I certainly am not taking my weekend easy by any means (I just won't be running 62 or 100 miles straight!). Friday's plan is to run 10x1000m on the track between 3:20 and 3:25 (5:20-5:30 mile pace) with equal time recovery. Saturday will be a long run of 20 or 21 miles and Sunday morning will be a tempo workout with a total of 45 minutes of hard running around 10-15 seconds under goal marathon pace. If the legs get the recovery they currently need during the first half of this week, the weekend of workouts will tell me a lot about my fitness and whether or not I am ready for a sub-1:20 half marathon and a sub-2:45 marathon.

1 comment:

J-ManRunner said...

Sounds like you are gearing up a good marathon in Fargo. Keep up the good work!