Counting Down

I count down the weeks before marathons. It's one of those things that I do. I'm sure many other marathoners do it too, but there's something about the numbers that motivates me and makes me happy.

I have just under three weeks of hard, heavy training, and then there's about a week and a half of decently hard training, and then it's all downhill. This week will be the worst of it, so technically from here on out, everything gets easier. This is so doable.

Saturday's pace run went exceptionally well. We had one of those "oh hell no" moments when we woke up on Saturday to the sound of the wind whipping around outside of our windows. And snow. did I mention the snow that was pelting us in the face when we went outside? Winds were somewhere around 20+ mph. So needless to say, it made the indoor/outdoor decision very easy. I took E-Speed's advice and put the treadmill on 1% and targeted an overall pace that was a bit under what my ideal pace would be. Nitty-gritty details are over at dailymile*, but overall I ended up with a pace that was 8:53/mile for the 12 miles. That's well under 4:00 pace, and decently under 3:55 pace (dream goal), so I'm feeling pretty good about this, especially because it felt good. A challenging sort of good, but not like I was exhausted by the end and couldn't go any further. When I reread the section on MP runs in Advanced Marathoning, Pfitz says that the objective is to get used to race pace, but it's also mostly to give you a confidence boost. If you can do this in the middle of heavy mileage, tempo runs, and interval sessions, you should feel confident that you can hit that pace for a marathon after the taper and resting up. I did a lot of visualizing how this run would go, and tried to follow a strategy that usually works for me on race day, and I think that really helped a lot. I'm excited.

This run was exactly what I needed. Last week's miles were a bit uninspired and I was feeling a bit run down on the recovery runs. I think that this run + getting a good amount of rest over the weekend were exactly what I needed to recharge. Yesterday's easy run felt great and I'm looking forward to the last LT run of the training cycle tonight.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but I'm starting to decide goals for the fall and for my training this summer, and I'm getting really excited about it all. Now it's just a matter of putting in the rest of the hard work, seeing how things shake out on May 1, and setting a goal from there. I think this may be awesome.

* widget is in the sidebar -- if you like details, go there.