05.22.08
Marathon or bust- Brent’s training update.
So I am in the midst of training for a marathon in seven weeks. After Penn Relays, I took a few days off and started what will be a rather short build-up for Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, MN on June 21st. There will be long runs of 16, 18, 20, 23, and 22 before this race, as well as many tempo runs at or under marathon pace (which I hope is around 5:20/mile). This is an interesting experiment and so far it is going pretty well. I have put in two weeks at just under 90 miles (last week this was in 6 days, as travel and some knee tightness had me take a day off), but the most encouraging thing is that my long runs have been easier, faster and are quicker to recover from than ever before. I think this has a lot to do with the additive property of consistent training. Before tapering my mileage at the end of track, I had 13-14 weeks averaging over 80 miles a week and since returning to regular competition a year and a half ago, I have had only a total of about 4-5 weeks without running and those have almost all been planned breaks of recovery. The result of this is consistent improvement. Also, I am learning to be patient with results and not put too much importance on any particular weeks mileage or any one workout.
Speaking of workouts, I had a good one last night, thanks to the great pacing efforts of Marc, Victor and John. I was never alone on any of my 10×1000s at ”Marc’s loop” and the pace was conistently between 3:00-3:03 per interval. Joan’s classic 90sec-80-70-60-3:00(set break)-60-70-80-90 recovery intervals were enough to keep me from overdoing it as well.
I have 4 weeks and two days before Grandma’s and a little more hay to put in the barn. Will it be enough? We shall see.
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Marc said,
May 24, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I went out to Umstead with Brent this morning for a 23 mile buzzsaw special (in 2:19:41 with a 7:45 opening mile), and we had such a fun time that he will probably shortly post an update to prove it.