Week One - Philadelphia Marathon Training

Week one of marathon training is complete! Here's my weekly overview:

Monday - 40 minute cross training (spin bike)

Tuesday - 40 minute easy run

Wednesday - Intervals (10 min warmup, 4 min running, 90 second rest X4, cool down)

Thursday - Rest day per plan, 1 mile run

Friday - 45 minute Fartlek run

Saturday - 75 minute long run

Sunday - Rest day per plan, 1 min run + 30 minute spin class

The race I'm training for is on a Sunday so the plan puts all of my long runs on Sundays. I prefer to do long runs on Saturdays though, it just works better for me typically. I moved the Fartlek from Saturday to Friday and the long run from Sunday to Saturday.

My running lately has been really about fresh air and relaxing and I just didn't know what to expect in the way of jumping into a prescribed plan. The humidity is just so thick right now. In fact if I didn't know better, I might be at the doctor asking if my lungs are okay. I do some treadmill runs in my basement though and I can breath fine so I know its the humidity. Every time I've persevered through training on the summer humidity, it's paid dividends in the fall. I love summer but the humidity is tough for hitting running paces and distances.

On Friday night, I felt every bit of the humidity on the Fartlek run. I honestly felt like I was running through mud and it wasn't fun. I gave me anxiety about Saturday's long run. My trepidation about the Garmin training plan was that the long runs are mostly time based and I'm afraid I'm too slow to get the number of miles I would want to be prepared for a marathon. I would expect to run about 6 miles for the first "long run" of a marathon training cycle. I went out to do a six mile route from my house. I anticipated I might get somewhere between 4-5 miles in 75 minutes and my plan was that when I hit 75 minutes, I would walk the rest of the way home so that I could get a total of 6 miles. Well to my surprise, I felt really good and humidity be darned, I was just over 6 miles at 75 minutes. I was extremely happy with the first long run and it pushed the crummy Friday night run out of my mind.

This week, I want to focus on getting some morning workouts. I am still doing my runstreak, at least one mile per day. So even on days when there's nothing on my training plan, I do at least one mile and I've been doing quite a bit of strength training the last two years so I generally do at least a core workout everyday. On those days, my entire workout is only about 30 minutes so to get those in before work is really nice. This last Wednesday I had a half day off work for a mid morning appointment so I got the interval run done in the morning and it was really nice to have a free evening.

I had an audience for this mornings spin session in the basement, little Tux.

On to week two!