Fall Marathoning

Over the years, I've considered running a fall marathon almost every year but I never have. The last two years, I've been taking MBA classes year round so I stuck with my standard spring marathon and several other races throughout the year but I wasn't adding another marathon. I finished my MBA in May so I felt like I could commit to fall marathon training. It's been a chaotic last few years between COVID, graduate school, and some health concerns for my husband which we seem to be on the other side of.

I ran a virtual marathon in March 2020 and one in March 2021. They were certainly not my best marathons but rather more about the mental toughness of getting 26.2 lonely miles done with no pomp and circumstance. In March 2022, I was back for an in-person Shamrock Marathon and although I didn't have the capacity to train the way I'd like to, I finished one minute slower than my current PR so I know I did a decent job maintaining my overall fitness.

This fall, I'm registered for the Philadelphia Marathon. It's somewhat local to me, an hour and a half away so we'll stay in a hotel after Saturday's packet pickup in preparation for Sunday's race but it won't involve days off work and a long drive. I'm looking forward to the experience of a big city race and hoping for a really good training cycle and hopefully a PR. I miss this little corner of the internet so I want to document my training process even just for my own enjoyment.

I also want to document my training each week because I plan to use a training plan through my Garmin GPS watch. I couldn't find much feedback at all online about the Garmin training plans so others might be interested in hearing about the training plans. Based on a quick eyeball of the plan, it appears fairly similar to the ones I've used before except for the long runs. For the most part, the weekly long runs are based on time. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the number of miles I would expect for marathon training in the time prescribed. I suspect I may need to make some tweaks to the long runs. I would generally aim for at least two 20 miles runs in a marathon training cycle and I'm not sure I can reach that in the time prescribed. I'll be using the intermediate marathon plan which includes 5 workouts per week. I've been doing quite a bit of strength training through the Peloton app which I also plan to keep up with.