Three Weeks to Go!

For the most part, the hardest of the work is over now. This weekend marked the 17th week from when I started training in earnest for Chicago. For the most part, training could not have gone much better. I managed to stay mostly injury free and logged my most consistent mileage ever. For the 9 weeks stretching from 6/2 - 8/3, I logged over 100 miles every week. From 8/3 - 9/21, the mileage dropped to around 90 miles a week, but the intensity increased. Overall from the beginning of June until now, I averaged 92.6 miles, which is by far the most I've ever averaged. Additionally, many of those miles were done at an intensity that I haven't done in the past. Overall, I'm very pleased with where I'm at right now.

Of course, I wouldn't be me, if I there still wasn't a certain amount of doubt heading into this weekend's long run. Ever since I struggled home on the half marathon over labor day, I've been a little hesitant to proclaim myself to be in the shape of my life, although the numbers seem to indicate that. I really needed a strong final 20 miler to give myself a good feeling heading into the taper. Luckily, things fell into place Sunday morning and things went very well. I ran it with my friend Dave, which was fitting since we've been pretty much doing the same training program since June. He finished the 17 weeks with a 92.5 average so we were pretty much identical in terms of mileage and intensity.

We thought about going 23 miles, but we both talked ourselevs out of that on Sunday, reasoning that a strong 20 miler would be more important than a 23 miles, with the risk of some struggling in the last 2 miles. Overall we averaged a pretty easy 6:34 pace for the whole thing. As we came down to the final 2 miles, I think we were both pretty jacked up about we accomplished over the summer and the 19th mile came in at 6:07 as we subconsciencly started to turn the screws. Once we saw the 19th mile split, we decided we couldn’t slow down on the last mile so we turned it on a little more and clocked a 5:51 for the final long run mile until race day. What was encouraging was that we were talking most of the way on that last mile. It was comfortable.

This was how the week went down:

Mon: 7 with 10 x 400's @ 76
Tues: 10 with 3 x 2 mile at lunch (10:47, 10:46, 10:45)
Wed: 9 easy in the am, 6 easy in the pm
Thurs: 12, with 10 @ 5:43 pace
Fri: 10 easy in the am, 7 easy in the pm
Sat: 8 easy
Sun: 20 @ 6:34 pace

Week: 90

On Monday I went to go get my marathon shoes during lunch. I ran 5 miles out to the running store, picked up a pair of Saucony Fastwitch Endurance. At about 8oz, these aren't the lightest trainers out there, but for a marathon I think they give me a pretty good blend of support at a nice weight. I ran home in them and they felt great. I'll probably put about 30 miles on them before race day which should work out nicely. Today was an extremely easy 4 miles. I was planning on doing 800's today, but was experiencing some IT Band pain this morning so I decided to keep things conservative and just take it easy. This knee has popped up a few times in the past few weeks, and usually if I give it a day to relax, it goes away pretty quickly. I'm hoping today is no different.