Training

If you’re not into boring posts about training plans, this post probably isn’t for you. If you’re a nerd and actually want to read about miles, workouts, and junk like that, read on.

It’s 20 days from Boston and I’m officially excited. I've had a great streak of training for Boston with only two setbacks: ITBS that knocked me out for about three weeks and a sore ankle that slowed me down a little. When I was planning for this race, I was hoping to average about 55 miles a week for the 14 weeks before my taper and to peak at about 70 miles.

Crunching the numbers tells me that I’ll average about 54 miles a week for the cycle. Not quite at my goal mileage, but the first two weeks of the 14 weeks were 15 and 21. The week before those two was also 15—low mileage due to ITBS. But, if I throw those weeks out I averaged 50 miles a week in the month before that, so really I feel like I did better mileage-wise than my average.

My plan to peak at 70 miles? I did 83 between this past Monday and Sunday, and after this week I will have run over 70 miles for 4 of my 14 weeks of training, 60+ for 7 weeks, and 50+ for 11 weeks.

I felt like my last marathon I didn’t have as much endurance as I needed to run finish the way I wanted, so in training for Boston I decided I needed to get more runs in the 20 mile range. Mission accomplished. I only did two 20 mile runs for my last marathon, but this cycle I’ve done five. I also simplified my workouts, doing a lot of tempo runs rather than some of the more complicated workouts from the Hudson plan.

I’m doing one tough interval workout on Thursday, the Ron Daws 25k as a marathon pace run on Saturday, then one more tough interval workout next week. Sunday will be my first day off after running 33 days straight. Bring on Boston.