Miles for the week: 13 (3/2/3/5) PRE-TRAINING WEEK 3
5 miles LSD: 58:31, average heart rate 150
Weight: 119
Resting HR: 48?
Fitness test: 49

Perfect day: sunny, breezy, not too hot. I tried to keep my speed down by focusing on a 3/3 rhythm for the first 4 miles, aiming for heart rate under 150 (except up hills), then picked up the pace for the last mile. Thanks to Mark adding me to his collection of running blogs this week, I got hooked on Hollie’s enthralling marathon training blog, which I spent way too much time reading but led me to think about focusing on not overdoing it! She pushed herself too hard in the early stages of training and suffered through several injuries. My mileage is still very, very low (and will stay that way with the Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer schedule), but I have to be careful of the desire to run faster on the long runs. I’ve also been reading that hills are equivalent to speedwork, in which case I’m forced to do speedwork on every single run. So taking the long run as easy as I can (“you should feel like you’re not working hard enough”) is important.

I’ve already started to think about how I plan to break down the marathon mentally, since the longest runs before it will be two eighteen milers. This will probably change as training really gets underway, but right now my plan is to think of the first 20 miles as “the last training run,” and the final 6.2 as “the marathon.” “The marathon is twenty miles of running and six miles of truth,” quotes Hollie. Yipes. And the amount of pain she ran with…I’ve had it really, really easy up until now.

The new running tights are working out OK. I’m also going to need non-cotton underwear, maybe a hat, & something to deal with sweat–tennis wristbands would work. Next week 14 miles, and then real training begins!

Flowering now: multiflora rose, which is *everywhere* and perfumes the air (it’s a noxious weed and I’m trying to get rid of it on our ten acres, but it does smell good); Virginia rose; wild sunflower; heal-all; yarrow; hop clover; mountain laurel in full bloom now. I saw some kind of ichneumenon wasp with an incredibly long ovipostor (at least as long as the rest of the body), a dragonfly, and lots of butterflies. There was a tiger swallowtail feeding from the mountain laurel (beautiful together), some tortoiseshells, and many butterflies I can’t find on a quick flip through my books: mostly black with a white stripe across the wings. [Turns out they were admirals; alive the white stripes line up to make a V, but the identification pictures I was looking at were of dead pinned butteflies, with wings spread out as they never are in life. 6/19/04] A couple of male goldfinches right near a stand of yellow hawkweed, so they looked like flying flowers themselves. No dogs or geese today, but earlier in the week there were about 7 or 8 geese couples with maybe 50 or 60 goslings, various ages but all quite large. Too many geese!

One thought on “

  1. Hey There!

    As Hollie found out, a marathon is a tough thing to train for and run but, your body will adapt so long as you build gradually (good on ya for figuring that out from Hollie’s blog).

    You can do it Hillary!

    Oh, just a note about hills being speedwork. They are like speedwork if you do hill REPEATS. This means you pick an hill and run it several times in one session. Start with a low number (like 3 hills) and build that up to 10 hills over several weeks.

    Once you have done this hill training, you will be ready to move up to more of the pure speed work type stuff but don’t worry about that yet.

    All the best!

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